Agnostic CI pipelines with run files
As I work on various projects, I use several different CI tools, such as GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines, and GitLab CI, as well as hosting providers that have build and deploy steps.
Some only run continuous integration checks, like automated tests and static analysis, some build and push Docker images, and some use Ansible and Ansistrano to deploy the changes to production.
Each tool has its configuration file with different settings and formats.
Rather than being too tightly coupled to a particular tool, I like to keep things as agnostic as possible and use a run file with separate ci:build and ci:deploy tasks.
This means that all the logic is within the run file rather than the CI tool-specific configuration file, so the file is shorter and cleaner; I can make changes to the CI tasks locally and quickly test changes and iterate, and also, as the logic is within the run file, I can easily switch to a different CI tool if needed without making changes to the tasks themselves.
- Oliver
