The importance of running CI checks locally

CI pipelines are a great way to enforce quality checks on your project. But I think they should be viewed as one of the final gates before release, not one of the first gates to catch something.

Why do I say that?

Running a CI check takes time and resources. Why push up your code, wait for it to run, see an error, then fix and repeat?

It's much better to run the quality checks locally before even pushing the branch up to be reviewed.

I'm not suggesting you should try to get your actual CI pipeline running locally. Instead, you can just run the same basic checks that the pipeline will run.

As a bonus, I even specify a ci script in my composer.json, which is run both by the actual pipeline, and by me locally.

Now, it has become muscle memory to run composer ci before pushing up a branch. I get my feedback more quickly and I don't burden the pipeline with unnecessary executions.

Here to help,

Joel

P.S. The Mastering Laravel community is a great place to learn from others and also share what you know.