Automate your workflow with GitHub Actions Continuous Integration.

GitHub Actions is a powerful tool that allows developers to automate their workflows and simplify their development process. With continuous integration, developers can automate the building, testing, and deployment of their applications, ensuring that their code is always of the highest quality. In this blog post, we will explore how to automate your workflow with GitHub Actions Continuous Integration, using Laravel and PHP as an example.

What is Continuous Integration?

Continuous Integration is the practice of automating the building, testing, and deployment of code changes. By continuously integrating changes into the codebase, developers can ensure that the code is always of high quality, and that it is working as intended. This practice is essential in modern software development, where there are often multiple developers working on the same codebase.

What is GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions is a feature-rich platform that allows developers to automate their workflows. With GitHub Actions, developers can create workflows that automate everything from building and testing their applications to deploying them to production environments. GitHub Actions is highly configurable and can be integrated with a variety of tools and services.

Setting up Laravel and PHP for Continuous Integration

To set up Laravel and PHP for Continuous Integration, we first need to create a new Laravel project. We can do this by running the following command:

luaCopy codecomposer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel my-project

Once we have created our Laravel project, we need to configure it for Continuous Integration. To do this, we need to add some tests to our project. Laravel comes with a PHPUnit test suite pre-installed, so we can use this to create our tests.

To create a new test, we can run the following command:

goCopy codephp artisan make:test ExampleTest

This will create a new test file in the tests/ directory of our project. We can then write our test code in this file. For example, we could write a test to ensure that our home page is returning a 200 HTTP status code. Here’s what that test might look like:

phpCopy codepublic function testHomePage()
{
    $response = $this->get('/');
    $response->assertStatus(200);
}

This test will send a GET request to our home page (/) and check that the response status code is 200.

We can then run our tests by running the following command:

pythonCopy code./vendor/bin/phpunit

This will run our tests and output the results to the console.

Automating our Workflow with GitHub Actions

Now that we have set up our Laravel project and created some tests, we can automate our workflow with GitHub Actions. To do this, we need to create a new workflow file in our project. This file should be named .github/workflows/ci.yml.

Here’s what our workflow file might look like:

yamlCopy codename: Continuous Integration

on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Checkout code
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: composer install
      
    - name: Run tests
      run: ./vendor/bin/phpunit

This workflow file defines a single job named build. This job runs on the ubuntu-latest operating system, and it has three steps:

1. Checkout code: This step checks out the code from our repository, so that we can run our tests on it.
2. Install dependencies: This step installs the project dependencies using Composer.
3. Run tests: This step runs our PHPUnit tests.

We can now commit this workflow file to our repository. When we push changes to our repository or open a pull request, GitHub Actions will automatically run our tests and report the results.