Should I Set Up a CI Environment Before Starting Development?

Short answer: yes, set up CI early but keep it straightforward. I've been doing web development for over 10 years, and I believe CI is more about building good habits than just picking the right tools. You don't need a perfect CI from day one; a basic setup for builds and tests early on can save you a lot of headaches later. For a mono repo with frontend and backend, I suggest one CI setup at the root with separate jobs for each. No need for a VM; CI providers handle execution in isolated environments. Remember, CI is more about merging features than being a feature itself.

Setting up CI is something I always do for anything beyond a quick experiment. I typically use GitHub with GitHub Actions, which has worked really well for me and has a solid free tier. For your projects, I recommend keeping the CI setups separate; it gives you better control and you can configure specific actions to run only for certain paths if needed. It's a great learning opportunity, too!

CI/CD is vital for development as it acts like a third party that validates your work. I usually start setting it up once I have some initial code written. I prefer GitLab because it comes with default CI/CD pipelines that are easy to customize for the languages I use. Storage is generous compared to GitHub, though the pipeline execution time is a bit limited.

I always set up CI at the beginning of a project, just keeping it simple with linting, formatting, and unit tests. This approach ensures your code stays consistent and makes it easier for contributions from others. Since you might already be on GitHub, GitHub Actions is a seamless choice.

I tend to put CI infrastructure in place after I've set up the basic structure but a week or two later. This way, I can have a quick demo for clients without needing fully established CI. I use GitHub Actions mainly, but I adapt to whatever the client prefers for mobile apps.