Running Tests in CI

The main goal of Continuous Integration is to catch bugs before they reach production. We do this by automatically running tests on every PR.

A Typical Node.js CI Pipeline

name: Run Tests
on: [pull_request]

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      
      - name: Setup Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: '20'
          cache: 'npm' # Speeds up builds by caching node_modules
          
      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: npm ci # Clean install, requires package-lock.json
        
      - name: Run Tests
        run: npm test

If npm test fails (exits with a non-zero code), the entire job fails, and GitHub will block the Pull Request from being merged.