Continous integration with Distelli
It’s like a buzz word: Continous Integration.
All talk about countinous integration, high frequent releases and automated tests. But in regular business there is no one really doing it. At software and web development companies these practices are more a kind of vision than reality. For sure they are companies doing it and generate benefits for their business modell. But my guess is, that most who use a continious integration process have a digital business model and the DNA of the company supports a straight strategy. As software developer for non digital companies it’s mostly a dream nobody likes to pay for.
As I am not a patient human and my experiences told me to know it better on my own, I set myself the goal to evaluate the technologies in depth and introduce them to my future projects as technical project manager.
For an easy start I looked out for a SaaS platform for continous integration and found Distelli as one of the well known. And they are capable of using docker builds and a pipelining approach.
So I implemented a tiny continous integration process for my own website, which builds my Jekyll website triggered by a commit on my integration branch and then deploys the static content to a test server. The next step is to include spome automated tests e.g. a screenshot regression test by Ghostinspector and deploy on sucess to production.
As that worked fine, I implemented the process for a small static website project of a customer to deliver test releases automatically on tagging a version an a specific branch. So no ssh login, git pull, scp upload or anything is required anymore.