Alejandro Celaya | Blog

In 2019, GitHub published their own solution to run automated workflows called GitHub Actions, which allowed those hosting their code in GitHub, to be able to define and run their CI/CD pipelines in the same platform. When it was released, one of the main pain points to use it was that defining pipe…

In the last couple of days I have been playing around with the idea of combining GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages to be able to dynamically build preview environments every time a pull request is opened against a repository hosting a client-side web app. The idea is that you can quickly preview the c…

Let's not deny that GitHub actions are hitting hard in the tech community, and many projects are transitioning from other continuous integration systems like Circle CI or Travis CI. Personally I have been using Travis a lot during the past years, for all my OSS projects, and I have gotten very used …

There's no doubt that having tests in a project allows you to find potential bugs earlier and more easily. Lots of OSS projects require a minimum code coverage in order to accept new pull requests from contributors, and proprietary projects also tend to have some sort of continuous integration workf…

Composer is The Tool in any modern PHP project. Nowadays I can't imagine to work without it. It is much more powerful than some people think, easily solving the integration of third party components in our projects, but there are some advanced features that are less known. I'm going to try to explai…

One of the common problems we have to confront when starting a new PHP project is how to handle the different dependencies we are going to have. One could think the easier solution is to download all the libraries we are going to need, put them in a lib directory and add them to the version control …

Dependency management is very important in any kind of project. Any application will need to use third party libraries to avoid to reinvent the wheel. The problem is that getting each one of them from a different place takes time, and it's not easy to be sure we get the correct version. To solve thi…

NSIS is a well known system used to create Windows installers for any type of application based on scripts. It is good system. Once we have defined our script we can automatically build it to create application installers in minutes, including creation of Windows register entries, installation folde…