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Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems (FedCSIS)

Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems, Volume 47

Emulating a Continuous Deployment Environment Using Locally Run GitHub Actions and a Containerized Deployment Server

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2026F3957

Citation: Boris Milašinović, ,

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Abstract. To align with standard IT practices, continuous practices are essential in software development courses. The lack of free cloud hosting solutions, or their unsuitability for academic content, hinders the acquisition of practical knowledge in continuous deployment and forces teachers to focus on on-premise solutions. The integration of the GitHub environment, consisting of a GitHub repository and GitHub Actions, with an on-premise server for deployment was the focus of the authors' previous work, which contributed a deployment workflow combining GitHub Actions and an on-premise server where students' applications are hosted on a shared server. This paper extends previous results by presenting a novel approach in which the deployment environment is simulated using Docker containers and combined with nektos/act for running GitHub Actions locally. This allows both teachers and students to emulate the complete workflow, including deployment, and experiment with workflows locally, thus saving GitHub build minutes.

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