To manage several servers, it’s quite time consuming if we need to do test and deployment one by one on a daily basis of development. I need to build, push images and serve applications manually (for containarized application). Imagine if we have many applications developed, how much time it takes to finish the same activities and steps? Then my geek friend taught me to automatically test and deploy everytime new change is pushed to certain branch using Gitlab CI. At that time, my work is getting easier. I just need to check if the pipeline is successfully runned and the application is already up. But since it’s quite long to explain the steps (it’s also involved with the gitlab-runner setup on EC2 AWS), I’ll write it down in another time :D.

I’m just so curious about how it works on Github. So I decided to figure out how to run CI using Github Action. It’s just a simple pipeline to run testing in Express using Mocha Chai.

1. Create simple express application. Do npm i express, npm i mocha chai --save-dev and set it up to run on a certain port.
2. Write simple function that can be called in test file:

   module.exports = {
    test : () => {
        return "Test CI"
     }
   }
   

3. Write simple test file:

    const { expect } = require('chai')
    const { test } = require('./controller');
       
    describe('Test return Test CI', () => {
   
    it('Successfully return Test CI', () => {
        const data = test()
        expect(data).to.equal('Test CI')
      })
    })
   

4. Setup script to run test on package.json file:

   "scripts": {
     "start": "node index.js",
     "test": "mocha test.js"
   },
   

5. Now, it is time to set up the pipeline. It’s really nice that Github already provided the default configuration. You can choose Actions tab on your repository and manage your own workflow setup. Here is mine:
   • Create pipeline file (node.js.yml / you can name the file as you want with extension .yml) on folder .github/workflows/

   

• Write the steps:

      name: Node.js CI // This is the title that can be changed as requirement
      on:
        push:
          branches: [ "main" ] // the pipeline will be runned everytime new change is pushed to this branch
      jobs:
        build:
  
          runs-on: ubuntu-latest // Specify the type of runner image
  
          strategy:
            matrix:
              node-version: [14.x, 16.x, 18.x] // The version of nodejs to use
              # See supported Node.js release schedule at https://nodejs.org/en/about/releases/
  
          steps:
          - uses: actions/checkout@v3  // Check out repository code
          - name: Use Node.js $
            uses: actions/setup-node@v3
            with:
              node-version: $  // Calling matrix variable to use Nodejs version. If you don't specify a Node.js version, GitHub uses the environment's default Node.js version
              cache: 'npm' // To cache and restore the dependencies
          - name: Install dependencies // To describe the step
            run: npm install
          - name: Running
            run: npm test
  
  

The job will run testing everytime new change is pushed to the main branch.