CircleCI Blog

Releases is a GitHub feature that allows you to present significant snapshots of your code, marked with a git tag, in GitHub’s nice UI. If you’re not currently using releases, I want to show you why you might want to, and how to implement them automatically.

With releases, you get what tags provide–a version number and description–but you also get a longer section for release notes and a place to store and display release artifacts. This means your software’s binary, .deb, .rpm, and AppImage files will be hosted by GitHub for each release, providing a convenient place for users to install your software.

In this post, I will show you how to create releases within CircleCI. For a more general overview, see GitHub’s doc on creating releases.

Overview

In this post, we’ll go over each step in building a basic software delivery pipeline. To do this, we’ll provide some examples to demonstrate an automated software delivery process with continuous delivery using CircleCI as a continuous integration server, and a package repository on packagecloud.

To learn more about fundamental concepts around software packages and package management and how to combine them with CI/CD to build a software delivery pipeline, read the previous post Continuous package publishing, part I: introduction to package management in CI/CD.

At CircleCI, we value diversity of all kinds. Our vibrant team what makes us who we are, and it’s what enables us to build great products. ‘CircleCI Voices’ is a new column on the blog where our team members can tell their stories and share the unique perspectives they bring to CircleCI. Our first story comes from our recruiting coordinator, David Lopez. We hope you enjoy!

Dear beautiful young queers,

I hope this letter finds you well. My name is David Lopez. I identify as a gay Latinx male, and I recently entered into the tech space from the nonprofit sector. The transition from one world into the other has not come easy. I want to share my own journey of joining the tech workforce, and show you that while it was, and is, an uphill battle, that my life experience as a queer person actually gave me many of the tools I needed to thrive here. I hope my story gives you encouragement and helps you see your potential when people try to tell you “no, you can’t.”

As a Senior Success Engineer, I’ve been helping many of our customers migrate their projects from CircleCI 1.0 to 2.0 over the past few months. And after migrating hundreds of projects, I know the most common places teams run into issues. In this blog post, I’ve collected the tips I’ve shared most often with customers while migrating their projects to CircleCI 2.0, and some gotchas to look out for along the way. Happy migrating!

This past week, some folks from the CircleCI team were honored to partner with Maven Youth, a Bay Area nonprofit focused on supporting LGBTQ+ youth interested in tech, for a morning of fun and skill-sharing as part of their Maven Youth Camp. We chose to partner with Maven Youth because of the strides the organization is making for the queer youth in tech, as well as our desire to do impactful work in the larger community as we build our own internal LGBTQ+ employee resource group (ERG) here at CircleCI.

This is the first of a two-part series on package management in CI/CD, written by Armando Canals, co-founder at packagecloud.

Overview

In this post, we’re going to explain some fundamental concepts around software packages and package management and how to combine them with CI/CD to build a software delivery pipeline.

We’ll go over software packages and repositories, continuous delivery, and automating the building, testing and release stages of the software development process.

This is the second of a two-part blog post on detecting and correcting errors with Rollbar and CircleCI, by guest contributor Jason Skowronski. Read part I here.

When you’re practicing continuous delivery, it’s essential that you monitor your application so you know that it’s performing well after deployments. You need to be notified immediately if something is wrong or if users are having a poor experience so you can resolve the issue quickly. When your monitoring solution can also tell you which code changes caused the error, you can save valuable time troubleshooting.

Today’s blog post is the first of a two-part series written by Jason Skowronski, who serves as the lead editor for technical content at Rollbar. Jason began his career as a software developer at Amazon and now enjoys being a developer advocate for the latest technologies.

Application errors can cause frustrating problems for customers that may ultimately lead to losing their trust and business. Experienced developers know what it’s like to have a critical production problem and spend minutes or perhaps even hours diagnosing a tricky problem. It’s even harder to diagnose when several developers are making changes and deployments in parallel.

Rollbar is an error monitoring solution that can tell you what errors occurred after a deployment and show you the deployment and code change that likely caused them. It integrates with your continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) system to track when deployments are promoted to production. When an new error occurs, it looks up the deployed version in your source code repository like GitHub to identify what code was changed and who changed it. This will help you narrow down errors due to code bugs faster.

This is a guest post by Pavlos-Petros Tournaris. It originally appeared on his blog here. Pavlos-Petros works as an Android software engineer at Workable. We hope you enjoy!

Nearly a year and a half ago, Facebook released Litho as an open source project. Litho is an Android framework, which lets you define your UI in a declarative way. It immediately got my interest and I started getting my hands dirty with some examples and pet projects.

Static Site Generators (SSGs) such as Hugo and Jekyll are all the rage nowadays. These static on the backend and JavaScript on the frontend websites are called JAMStacks. Typically, we test them in two ways:

• via the SSG successfully building the site
• and HTMLProofer

What if we wanted to do more? Let’s walk through a new tool I made for testing markdown files and how it improved the accuracy of CircleCI docs examples.