CI CD Pipeline

CI/CD Pipeline

Overview

Automate everything between code push and production deployment. A good pipeline catches bugs early and deploys confidently.

When to Use

• Setting up CI/CD for a new project
• Adding automated tests to pipeline
• Improving deployment speed or reliability
• Implementing release automation

Pipeline Stages

Push → Lint → Test → Build → Security Scan → Deploy Staging → Deploy Production

Minimum Viable Pipeline

1. Lint — catch style/syntax issues instantly
2. Test — unit + integration tests
3. Build — verify it compiles/bundles
4. Deploy — automated to staging, gated to production

GitHub Actions Template

name: CI
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  ci:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4  # or setup-python, etc.
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm run lint
      - run: npm test
      - run: npm run build

Best Practices

• Fast feedback — lint and unit tests should finish in <2 minutes
• Fail fast — run cheapest checks first (lint before test before build)
• Cache dependencies — actions/cache for node_modules, pip cache, etc.
• Branch protection — require CI pass before merge
• Environment secrets — never hardcode, use GitHub Secrets / Vault
• Parallel jobs — split test suites across runners
• Artifact storage — save build outputs for deployment stage

Deployment Strategies

Checklist

• All tests run in CI (not just locally)
• Pipeline fails on lint errors
• Secrets stored securely (not in code)
• Deploy to staging automatically on merge to main
• Production deploy requires approval or tag
• Pipeline runs in <10 minutes

Integration

• magic-powers:finishing-a-development-branch — merge workflow that triggers CI
• magic-powers:docker-containerization — build container images in CI
• magic-powers:security-review — add security scanning to pipeline