Extreme Startup

For this exercise, we will use an automated build pipeline to deploy a simple web application. We will use GitHub Actions and Railway, which are easy to set up.

Set Up a Build Pipeline

1. Fork our web app on GitHub, clone it, and get it running locally

• Fork this repo into your own GitHub account.
• Clone your fork locally and import the code into your IDE. It’s a Java / Gradle project.
• Run the main method in ServerApplication. Then you can see the app running at http://localhost:8080.

2. Setting up deployment to the cloud

• Create an account on Railway at railway.app (you could get an email for confirmation).
• Create an empty project on Railway
• You can change the name later in Project Settings.

3. Setting up automatic deployment to Railway with GitHub Actions

• Get your Railway API Token and add it to GitHub as a secret variable for your build pipeline. You can get it by navigating to Account Settings > Tokens. Provide a name in New Token > and click Create.
• Add this token on your GitHub fork by navigating to Settings > Secrets and Variables > Actions. Press New repository secret and provide a name and paste the generated Token by Railway.
• Click in Add a Service and select your Github Repo. This process could take around 1 - 4 minutes (depending on your internet connection).
• Then in settings, you can create your Domain by clicking Generate Domain.

4. Pushing changes through the pipeline

• Make a change to your application (e.g. change some HTML in IndexPage). Commit, push and check it is deployed in the created domain in the previous step.