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Continuous integration (CI) and Continuous delivery (CD) is essential in today’s software development cycle. With Flox the exact same set of software can be used for local development and a CI/CD pipeline. This feature works out of the box with Flox because Flox environments work cross-platform and reproducibly by default. This means that you can spend less time debugging your CI/CD pipeline and more time developing your software. Let’s look at how you can use Flox with a variety of CI/CD platforms. For the following examples assume that you have a repository that contains a Flox environment, and assume that you’ve installed some Node.js dependencies for your project.

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GitHub Actions

Flox provides two different actions that you can use in a GitHub Actions workflow:
  • flox/install-flox-action: This action installs the Flox CLI so you can run Flox commands as you would locally. At some point you would typically run flox activate -c "<your command>" with this action to run a command inside the Flox environment.
  • flox/activate-action: This action allows you to skip activating the environment yourself and simply provide the command that you would like to run in the environment.
Note that the flox/install-flox-action is still required if you want to use flox/activate-action. Here is an example workflow that installs the Flox CLI, runs npm run build inside the project’s environment, and runs netlify deploy inside a FloxHub environment:
.github/workflows/ci.yml
name: "CI"

...

jobs:

  build:
    name: "Build website"
    runs-on: "ubuntu-latest"
    steps:
      - name: "Checkout"
        uses: "actions/checkout@v4"

      - name: "Install Flox"
        uses: "flox/install-flox-action@v2"

      - name: "Build"
        uses: "flox/activate-action@v1"
        with:
          command: npm run build

      - name: Activate remote environment
        uses: flox/activate-action@v1
        with:
          environment: my-username/my-netlify-env
          command: netlify deploy
This is an example project; yours will probably look a little different. flox/install-flox-action installs the latest version of Flox, and flox/activate-action runs a command inside the Flox environment.

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CircleCI

There is a Flox Orb that helps you use Flox inside CircleCI. Similar to GitHub Actions there is a flox/install step and a separate flox/activate step. Here is an example CircleCI workflow that installs Flox and runs npm run build inside the environment:
.circleci/config.yml
version: 2.1

orbs:
  flox: flox/orb@1.0.0

jobs:
  build:
    machine:
      image: ubuntu-2204:current
    steps:
      - checkout
      - flox/install
      - flox/activate:
          command: "npm run build"
The install step installs the latest Flox release by default; you can pin a specific release with the channel and version options. The activate step runs a command in the context of a Flox environment.

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GitLab

To run Flox in a GitLab pipeline you use a container image with Flox preinstalled. Flox provides the ghcr.io/flox/flox image for you to use in your pipelines. Inside the container you have access to the full Flox CLI, so running a command in the container looks the same as it would locally: flox activate -c "<your command>". Here is an example GitLab pipeline that uses a Flox container to run npm run build inside the environment:
.gitlab-ci.yml
build:
  stage: build
  image: ghcr.io/flox/flox:latest
  script:
    - flox activate -c "npm run build"
The ghcr.io/flox/flox image comes with Flox already installed, so flox activate -c runs the command inside the Flox environment.

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Suggestions

Now that you know how to use your Flox environment in CI/CD, the world is your oyster. Here are some suggestions for things you can do with your Flox environment in CI:
  • Run a linter to ensure that new changes adhere to your team’s style.
  • Use flox containerize to build a container from your environment to deploy elsewhere.
  • Build artifacts for multiple systems.
  • Run a link checker over your documentation.

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Where to next?