Implementing Continuous Deployment With Github Actions and On-Premises Servers In Software Development Education

In software development and software engineering courses, the focus is often on the development part, where continuous practices are only covered theoretically, or at best with the practical part ending with the continuous integration step, mostly due to lack of teachers’ skills and hardware resources. This paper presents a case study from a software development elective where students have to develop a .NET web application based on requirements from an interview with a simulated user. Throughout the development process, the students’ development process is supported by continuous deployment. The solution that enables continuous deployment is achieved through a combination of GitHub Actions and on-premises server to overcome the problem of lack of resources for the solution in the cloud. The contribution of the paper is the detailed description of the deployment workflow, the link to a full script code and the detailed guide on how an on-premises server should be prepared to utilize continuous deployments for ASP.NET Core web applications.