Speed Up Your Rails Testing Workflow with Local CI

Most developers and testers have been a part of this story before: You work on your feature, commit new code, and push it to the repository. You pick up the next task on your list and begin working on it. Fifteen minutes later, you receive a notification from your continuous integration service saying your last commit caused a failure in your checks. Now you have to figure out what happened, commit a fix, and pray that it doesn’t break again. Beyond the cost of context switching between tasks, there’s a good chance that your CI runs don’t run as fast as you’d like. All that time switching back-and-forth between tasks and waiting for your slow CI service to spin up and execute your tests adds up to a lot of wasted time. This wasted time is something that newer versions of Ruby on Rails aim to resolve. One of the new and under-heralded features introduced in the recent release of Rails 8.1 is local continuous integration, or local CI. This functionality provides a new DSL to let you specify all the steps needed to check your app, from running tests to verifying code quality to doing security scans—everything you need to let you confidently deploy new updates of your app to production and do it fast.