Get Started With CI/CD Using GitHub Actions

Part 1 of “Comparing CI/CD Tools”. In this introduction to GitHub Actions, we’ll explore how easy it is to build and deploy a simple Python Flask application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Welcome to the first part of a series of articles comparing CI/CD platforms. To help evaluate, compare and contrast the tools currently dominating the market, the goal will be to automate the deployment of a Flask application onto AWS Elastic Beanstalk. A new deployment will need to occur after every push to main branch, and during the series this same requirement will be implemented across a multitude of CI/CD tools.

First up, part 1 will focus on GitHub Actions, where the support for CI/CD was first announced in August 2019. I’ll document the steps taken along the way to achieve the goal with GitHub Actions, and there’s a write up of the positives and negatives in a conclusion at the end of this article.

Our application

The Flask application

Our Flask application is a simple “Hello World” example, and for the purposes of demonstrating running unit tests within the pipeline, we have included a test case as well.