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Continuous Integration and Deployment of Docker Images using GitHub Actions
Automatically build and push Docker images to Docker Hub using GitHub Actions
According to GitHub, GitHub Actions allows you to automate, customize, and execute your software development workflows right in your repository. You can discover, create, and share actions to perform any job you would like, including continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), and combine actions in a completely customized workflow.
This brief post will examine a simple use case for GitHub Actions — automatically build and push a new Docker image to Docker Hub. A GitHub Actions workflow will be triggered every time a new Git tag is pushed to the GitHub repository.
GitHub Project Repository
For the demonstration, we will be using the public NLP Client microservice GitHub project repository. The NLP Client, written in Go, is part of five microservices that comprise the Natural Language Processing (NLP) API. I developed this API to demonstrate architectural principles and DevOps practices. The API’s microservices are designed to be run as a distributed system using container orchestration platforms such as Docker Swarm, Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon ECS, and Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS).
Encrypted Secrets
To push new images to Docker Hub, the workflow must be logged in to your Docker Hub account. GitHub recommends storing your Docker Hub username and password as encrypted secrets, so they are not exposed in your workflow file. Encrypted secrets allow you to store sensitive information as encrypted environment variables in your organization, repository, or repository environment. The secrets that you create will be available to use in GitHub Actions workflows. To allow the workflow to log in to Docker Hub, I created two secrets, DOCKERHUB_USERNAME and DOCKERHUB_PASSWORD using my organization’s credentials, which I then reference in the workflow.
