Implementing Local CI/CD with GitHub Actions & Minikube (Windows Edition)

Here is the seventh and final blog post:

🚀 Blog 7: Implementing Local CI/CD with GitHub Actions & Minikube (Windows Edition)

Welcome to the final part of our DevOps series! Now that you have a working Kubernetes cluster with autoscaling, ingress, and monitoring, it's time to automate deployments using CI/CD.

In this post, we’ll set up a local CI/CD pipeline that builds, tests, and deploys your Angular app to Minikube whenever you push code to GitHub.

🤔 What Do These Terms Mean and Why Use Them?

• CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment): This is a set of practices that enable rapid and reliable delivery of applications.
  • Continuous Integration (CI): The practice of regularly merging code changes from all developers into a central repository, followed by automated builds and tests.
    • Why? Integrates code frequently to detect integration errors early, reducing bugs and simplifying debugging.
  • Continuous Deployment (CD): The practice of automatically deploying all code changes that pass automated tests to a production or development environment without manual intervention.
    • Why? Automates the release process, speeding up delivery, reducing manual errors, and allowing for faster feedback loops.
• GitHub Actions: A CI/CD platform integrated directly into GitHub. It allows you to automate tasks within your software development workflow, such as building, testing, and deploying code.
  • Why? Provides an easy-to-use, cloud-native way to create automated workflows triggered by GitHub events (like pushes or pull requests), all managed directly within your repository.

🛠️ Tools We'll Use

⚙️ Step 1: Prepare Your Local Environment

Since Minikube runs locally, the GitHub Action workflow cannot directly deploy to your Minikube cluster over the internet. For local CI/CD testing, we will:

• Build Docker images locally in Minikube’s Docker engine
• Deploy to Kubernetes using kubectl from local scripts

For production or cloud clusters, you’d push images to a registry like Docker Hub or ECR.

⚙️ Step 2: Create a Deployment Script (deploy.sh)

Create a simple shell script in your project root to:

• Set Minikube Docker environment
• Build your Angular Docker image
• Apply Kubernetes manifests
• Restart deployment

#!/bin/bash

echo "🔧 Setting Docker environment to Minikube..."
eval $(minikube docker-env)

echo "🐳 Building Docker image in Minikube..."
docker build -t angular-app:latest .

echo "📦 Applying Kubernetes manifests..."
kubectl apply -f angular-deployment.yaml
kubectl apply -f angular-service.yaml
kubectl apply -f angular-ingress.yaml

echo "♻️ Restarting deployment..."
kubectl rollout restart deployment/angular-app-deployment

echo "✅ Deployment script completed!"

💡 On Windows, you can run this in Git Bash or WSL.

Make it executable (in Git Bash or WSL):

chmod +x deploy.sh

⚙️ Step 3: Example GitHub Actions Workflow (.github/workflows/ci-cd.yml)

Add this workflow file to your repo to automate build & tests on GitHub:

name: CI/CD Pipeline

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  build-and-test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Set up Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: "18"

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm install

      - name: Run Angular build
        run: npm run build --configuration=production

      - name: Run tests
        run: npm test -- --watch=false

  # Note: Deployment to local Minikube needs to be triggered locally

⚙️ Step 4: How to Trigger Deployment Locally

Since your Minikube cluster runs locally, you can deploy with your script manually after code changes:

./deploy.sh

Or you can automate this further with tools like GitHub Actions Runner on your local machine, but that’s an advanced topic.

🤝 Summary

• We created a deployment shell script that builds and deploys your Angular app inside Minikube.
• We set up a GitHub Actions workflow to build and test code on every push.
• You now have a simple local CI/CD pipeline to improve your development workflow!