Do you want your engineering team to deliver bug-free code at high velocity? A fast and reliable CI/CD pipeline is crucial for doing that sustainably over time. What is a CI/CD pipeline? A CI/CD pipeline helps you automate steps in your software delivery process, such as initiating code builds, running automated tests, and deploying to a staging or production environment. Automated pipelines remove manual errors, provide standardized development feedback loops…

Semaphore gives you the power to easily create CI/CD pipelines that build, run and deploy Docker containers. DigitalOcean recently introduced a managed Kubernetes service which simplifies running cloud-native applications. Together, they’re a great match for productive software development. In this article we’ll show you how to connect these two services together in a fast continuous delivery pipeline. What we’re building We’ll use a Ruby Sinatra microservice which exposes a few…

Article originally published on The New Stack. The goal of every tech leader is to deliver bug-free products to customers at high velocity. Today’s cloud-native technology can empower engineering teams to iterate, at scale, faster than ever. But teams that don’t also change how they deliver software will struggle to benefit from the agility and speed to deployment that cloud native can offer.

We are very excited to share the good news with you: Semaphore 2.0 is finally out!

Adoption of serverless technology is surely growing, with emerging product companies who built on top of it. One of them is CloudZero, a Semaphore customer, who recently wrote a detailed article about their experience in achieving continuous delivery for their all-serverless system.

Semaphore 2.0 closed beta is now available. Make sure to get on the list for an early invite.

Today we’re happy to announce general availability of the Docker Light platform. Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the environment provides one physical CPU (2 vCPUs), 4GB of RAM and 10GB of disk space.

At Semaphore, for years we’ve been happy to support open source projects with a free continuous integration service. Today we’re increasing the free CI/CD capacity on all open source organizations from 2 to 4 Boxes.

This post is adapted from Rails Testing Handbook, a free ebook on building sustainable Rails apps with BDD. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of generating a new Rails 5 application, with all the necessary tools to set up a behavior-driven development (BDD) flow. We will set up 5 tools that represent the base of BDD development in Rails: RSpec for writing unit test, Cucumber for…

Ruby on Rails was the first major web framework to include automated tests as part of every new project. The effects have been enormously positive. Many developers have learned to write tests well, which in turn helped them get better at design. Experienced developers were drawn by Rails’ focus on productivity and beautiful code. Their community activities have helped push the craft of web development forward. Over the years positive…

Bugs and messy code slow down development, and can make complex projects fail. We write code with good intentions, but in practice as complexity increases we need a system to help us avoid problems. This is where BDD (Behavior-driven Development) can make a huge difference: it provides us with a sustainable process for continuously producing high-quality software, with clean code and automated tests as a side effect.

If you’ve been using PhantomJS for continuous integration, please switch to Headless Chrome. Semaphore provides recent versions of both Chrome and chromedriver preinstalled out of the box.

At the heart of continuous delivery is a fast feedback loop that immediately shows developers the effects of their work. Mistakes are found and fixed quickly, while beneficial changes can be released and deployed to customers without having to wait for a distant future release date. This rapid feedback helps build an organizational culture of learning and responsibility.

Being able to compare the way you’re working to rest of the industry is usually both interesting and useful. This is why we created Rails Testing Grader, a new tool backed by anonymous, real-world data from Semaphore that lets you compare the state of your test suite and CI build to Ruby on Rails projects of same size.

View diagram in full screen Continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery are like vectors that have the same direction, but different magnitude. Their goal is the same: make our software development and release process faster and more robust. The key difference between the three is in the scope of automation applied. What gets people who are new to the field confused is that they are not mutually exclusive, but…

As any application grows in features, running all automated tests in the continuous integration (CI) environment begins to take a significant amount of time. A slow CI build — anything longer than 10 minutes — takes a toll on everyone’s focus, flow and productivity. How do you move fast when even a trivial update or hotfix takes 15 minutes to reach production? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?

One of the most important things we teach the junior programmers who join the Semaphore team is the mindset of shipping in small iterations. This is a simple concept, however there’s an inevitable misunderstanding that stems from the subjective ideas of “small”. Thus, in practice we need to teach by example what we really mean by small. When you’re inexperienced, the desire to do and show your best work often…