Continuous Deployment for ZAT App

A simple continuous deployment (CICD) pipeline for your private Zendesk applications.

Photo by panumas nikhomkhai from Pexels

Zendesk allows creating of custom applications using Zendesk’s App Framework (ZAF) that can be used to enhance the base capabilities of the Zendesk environment. See their app scaffold here. Two different ways to deploy their application are provided: Upload a zip of the application manually or run a sequence of update commands on the developer’s machine.

However, what if we want to have our app automatically deployed whenever we push (or merge) to a specific branch? A third option is presented here: A Github Actions based automatic deployment!

Pre-requisites

Have a ZAF compatible application developed and uploaded into Zendesk. More information can be found here and here.

Step 1: Creating the Github Actions File

We create a file .github/workflows/deploy.yml which will define our deployment workflow.

Below, is the first portion of the file. There are a few points worth noting here:

1. The name attribute defines the name that appears on GitHub whenever our action runs.
2. The on attribute specifies the condition used to trigger our action. In this case: A push to…