cicd-recipes

CI/CD tips and tricks, script recipes etc

Github Workflows

It’s a really powerful tool to automate your development and deployment processes.

It allows you to run a workflow triggered by some event in github.

In addition to general bash scripting knowledge, few cli tools you will find indispensable when working with CI pipelines:

• gh - official github cli client
• jq - cli program for processing JSON
• awk - powerful text processing tool (language) universally available on (almost) every terminal environment

Bash scripting gotchas

• Use set -e in the beginning of your script to make sure the script exits on the first failure. The default behavior of bash is to continue running regardless of errors.
• Use $() “double quotes” and ‘single quotes’ when necessary
• Know how to pass data into and out of commands:
  • cat data.json | jq '.' – use cat to read the file and pipe it into the stdin of jq
  • jq '.' < data.json – read the file at path and pass it into the stdin of jq
  • jq '.' data.json – if the tool supports it pass filenames as cli arguments
  • ls *.json | xargs jq '.' – xargs takes a whitespace separated list and passes it to the command as positional arguments. If the ls command returns "d1.json d2.json" this is equivalent to jq '.' d1.json d2.json