Continuous Integration (CI) has become an essential part of modern software development, and for good reason. It ensures code quality, speeds up development, and catches potential issues early. However, you can get started without an elaborate CI setup. Even a minimal CI setup can significantly improve your workflow. Here’s why every project should have at least minimal CI and how to implement it effectively using GitHub Actions.

What Constitutes Minimal CI?

For a project to benefit from CI without excessive complexity, it should include the following essential components:

1. Project Compilation: Verify that the codebase is always in a buildable state.
2. Unit Test Execution: Ensure the core functionality works as expected.
3. Static Code Analysis: Catch bugs and enforce coding standards before they become an issue.

Why GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions offers a simple yet powerful CI/CD platform that integrates seamlessly with GitHub repositories. Its ease of use makes it accessible even for developers without extensive DevOps experience. In fact, with just a few workflows, you can have a robust CI pipeline for small projects.

For example, for my small open-source Go library GFSM, three workflows—build, static-check, and publish—are sufficient.

Setting Up Your Workflows

1. Build Workflow

The build workflow ensures your code compiles and passes tests on every push or pull_request to any branch:

2. Static Code Analysis

Static analysis helps maintain code quality by catching potential issues early. The best Go linter at the moment – staticcheck, provides an excellent integration with GitHub actions out of the box. Like the build workflow, this workflow runs on every push or pull_request:

3. Publish Workflow

Publishing a new version to pkg.go.dev ensures that users always have access to the latest updates. The tricky part is triggering the pkg.go.dev proxy to update its cache for new versions. On comparison with build and static-check workflows, we should trigger new version publication only on a new tag push in a semantic versioning format. Here’s how you can set up this workflow to track new tags and ping the proxy:

Reusable Composite Actions

Both the build and static-check workflows require the same environment setup. To avoid duplicating this logic, use GitHub Actions’ composite feature to create a reusable setup action:

This composite action ensures consistency and simplifies workflow maintenance.

Looking Ahead

Go currently relies on the tools.go file for dependencies, which I find a too ugly approach and prefer to have some extra go get/install/generate in my environment setup yaml file. But Go 1.24 promises a much cleaner approach with its “track tool dependencies in go.mod (#48429)” feature. Once available, it will streamline dependency management much more excellently.

Final Thoughts

Implementing minimal CI with GitHub Actions requires minimal effort but yields significant benefits. By automating builds, tests, and static analysis, you can ensure your project maintains high quality and is always ready for deployment. For small projects, this setup is a no-brainer, and GitHub Actions makes it easy to get started.