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Figure 1. Relationship between Configurations, Stages and Actions.
Stage Gates
Stage gates are coupled with stages and act as a road block after the completion of each stage. Stage gates allow you to define a list of conditions that must be met after that stage has finished. The build will only continue if these conditions are met. For example, if you have a test stage that runs tests on your compiled project then you can set the test stage gate to only continue the build if all tests completed successfully.
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Figure 2. An Example Build Stages Pipeline
Actions
An action is a single step within a stage that usually performs a very simple task. These actions are the steps that actually perform your build process. Most actions in Continua CI act as a wrapper around an executable provided by the user. The built-in actions in Continua CI range from advanced actions like MSBuild, FinalBuilder and Ant to simple actions like copying or deleting a file. Actions can also be of the flow control type which dictate the execution flow of that particular stage. For a full list of actions see Actions Reference.