Step-by-step articles on Delivery, part of our Cloud & DevOps collection.
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Git records snapshots of your project over time. Once you understand three places (working directory, staging area, repository), the everyday commands make sense. The three areas Working directory - your files as you edit them. Staging area - changes you've se...
GitHub Actions runs automated workflows when things happen in your repository: a push, a pull request, a schedule or a manual click. The most common first use is CI: run tests on every change. Anatomy of a workflow Workflow - a YAML file in .github/workflows/...
A branching strategy is an agreement about how work flows into the main branch and out to users. The trend in recent years has been towards fewer, shorter-lived branches. GitHub Flow main is always deployable. Create a branch for each change. Open a pull reque...
Installing dependencies is often the slowest part of a CI run. Caching downloads between runs can cut minutes from every workflow. The easy way: built into setup actions - uses: actions/setup-node@v4 with: node-version: 22 cache: npm # also: yarn, pnpm - uses:...
Six months from now, git log and git blame are how someone (often you) will understand why a line of code exists. The commit message is where that answer lives. The classic format Fix double charge when payment webhook is retried The payment provider retries w...
A matrix runs the same job with different combinations of values: several Node.js versions, operating systems or database versions, in parallel. A basic matrix jobs: test: runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }} strategy: matrix: os: [ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macos-la...
Both merge and rebase combine work from two branches. They differ in the history they produce. Merge: preserve history as it happened git switch feature/search git merge main # creates a merge commit joining both histories Safe and non-destructive, but frequen...
Workflows need configuration (URLs, flags) and credentials (API keys, deploy tokens). GitHub provides separate tools for each, plus environments to control who and what can deploy where. Secrets and variables Secrets are encrypted, masked in logs and not reada...
Git rarely loses work for good. Pick the right command for what you want to undo and where the change currently lives. Discard uncommitted changes git restore src/cart.js # throw away edits to a file (careful: not recoverable) git restore --staged src/cart.js...
Storing cloud access keys as GitHub secrets works, but those keys live forever and can leak. With OpenID Connect (OIDC) , GitHub gives each workflow run a signed token, and your cloud exchanges it for temporary credentials. There are no keys to steal or rotate...
A conflict means Git found two changes to the same lines and won't guess which one you want. It's a normal part of teamwork, not an error. 1. See what's conflicted git status # both modified: src/pricing.js 2. Read the markers function shippingFee(total) { <<<...
When ten repositories have nearly identical CI files, every improvement must be made ten times. GitHub Actions offers two ways to share. Composite actions: share a group of steps # .github/actions/setup-app/action.yml name: Set up app description: Install Node...
Slow reviews are usually a symptom of hard-to-review pull requests. You can make yours easy to say yes to. 1. Keep it small Aim for changes a reviewer can understand in 15-20 minutes, often under a few hundred lines. Split big work into steps that each make se...
A common pipeline: every push to main builds an image, tags it with the commit and pushes it to a registry, ready to deploy. The workflow name: Docker image on: push: branches: [main] tags: ['v*'] permissions: contents: read packages: write # push to ghcr.io j...
"It worked last week." Somewhere among 200 commits, something broke. git bisect finds the culprit with a binary search: about 8 checks for 200 commits. Manual bisect git bisect start git bisect bad # the current commit is broken git bisect good v2.3.0 # this r...
CI pipelines hold deploy credentials and write access to your code, which makes them attractive targets. These practices close the most common holes. 1. Least-privilege GITHUB_TOKEN permissions: contents: read # default for the whole workflow jobs: release: pe...
Switching branches means stashing work, waiting for rebuilds and losing your place. A worktree is an extra working directory attached to the same repository, so different branches can be checked out at the same time. Basic commands # Check out an existing bran...
A CI pipeline that takes 25 minutes slows down every pull request. Most pipelines can be made several times faster with a few changes. 1. Cancel outdated runs concurrency: group: ci-${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }} cancel-in-progress: true When you pus...
Anyone can set user.email to your address and make commits that look like yours. Signing commits proves they were made by someone holding your private key. Git supports signing with SSH keys, which is much simpler than setting up GPG. 1. Tell Git to sign with...
Releasing by hand (build, write notes, upload files) is slow and easy to get wrong. A tag-triggered workflow does it the same way every time. Trigger on version tags # .github/workflows/release.yml name: Release on: push: tags: ['v*.*.*'] permissions: contents...
