CI/CD

The first step to design a CI/CD setup for your SaaS is to define a branching strategy. There are many ways of working with branches to make sure you work in a reliable and developer friendly way. Building Volca, we have focused on simplicity and developer experience while maintaining a reliable deployment flow. That is why we have went for a trunk based strategy where a single branch, the main branch, is the one that all developers branch off from.

To be able to test your code before it is usable by your customers, you need isolated environments in which different versions of your code is running. In complex enterprise setups, there might be a large number of environments. When building a SaaS from scratch however, you need to keep things simple to be able to ship new features fast. That is why Volca comes with two environments with automated deployments out of the box: staging and production. In addition, developers have their own local environments where code is tested during development.

As a developer, more branches to switch between equal a higher risk of something going wrong and wasting time. That is why we chose to use a single branch for all development: the main branch. When building a feature, all developers branch off from the master branch and run the application locally. Once the feature is ready to merge, the developer creates a PR towards the main branch. When the PR has been created, a GitHub Action is triggered that runs code quality checks and tests. Once the PR is merged to the main branch, the change is deployed to staging and later to production.