Imagine yourself in this situation: You are a motivated and skilled DevOps or DevEx engineer. You have a plan to implement automated, complete CI/CD pipelines. You know how to do it, and you know how the extra productivity and automation will benefit your team and the whole company. But the project is never approved, because of security concerns. Many organizations, especially those in regulated industries, have strict requirements for releasing their software, and rightfully so.

If you have been around for a while in the field of software development, especially web development, then you know how tedious and stressful it has historically been to deploy your source code to a webserver. Most of the time, this was accomplished by uploading it using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). But now we have numerous ways of automating the deployment process. In this tutorial, we will learn how to set up continuous deployment of a Nest.js application to Heroku using CircleCI.

Continuous integration (CI) involves the test automation of feature branches before they are merged to the main Git branch in a project. This ensures that a codebase does not get updated with changes that could break something. Continuous delivery (CD), on the other hand, builds upon CI by automating releases of these branches or the main branch. This allows small incremental updates that reach your users faster, in line with Agile software development philosophy.

We recently revamped our freemium plan to be the most generous free CI/CD tier for developers on the planet. In addition to making powerful features and resources available on the Free plan, we’ve extended self-hosted runners to all CircleCI plans.

Before automation became commonly used by software development teams, bottlenecks, repetitive tasks, and human error were rampant. Automation has freed up valuable human resources for organizations while reducing the risk of human error caused by active human brains trying to perform mundane repetitive tasks. Recent strides in the area of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) have made it more feasible to automatically deploy updates to software applications.

Most developers care about building the next big thing. Automating your build, test, and release processes allows you to maintain focus on innovating and delivering value to your users. By combining the power of best-in-class CI/CD workflow orchestration with managed environments-as-a-service, developers can stay focused on building what’s next.