Continuous Integration is a mechanism used to enable DevOps methodology in development process i.e. helps to obtain immediate feedback on the changes made in the code by executing unit and acceptance tests, as soon as the code changes are checked-in to the repository.
A typical process involves developers merging their changes to the branch as often as possible and they are validated by building, running and executing automated tests against the application.
Docker plays a key role in enabling CI, as it can seamlessly integrate with any popular CI tools like Jenkins or TeamCity. Also, several Gradle plugins like Palantir, trans mode are available for automating the docker build and publish images by creating respective Gradle tasks.
We can then define stages in Jenkins to perform tasks like building Docker images, starting containers using compose and executing Acceptance tests to validate the application changes.
