CI/CD Pipeline Setup

Table of Contents

• [Overview](#overview)
• [When to Use](#when-to-use)
• [Quick Start](#quick-start)
• [Reference Guides](#reference-guides)
• [Best Practices](#best-practices)

Overview

Build automated continuous integration and deployment pipelines that test code, build artifacts, run security checks, and deploy to multiple environments with minimal manual intervention.

When to Use

• Automated code testing and quality checks
• Containerized application builds
• Multi-environment deployments
• Release management and versioning
• Automated security scanning
• Performance testing integration
• Artifact management and registry

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# .github/workflows/deploy.yml
name: Build and Deploy

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - develop
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

env:
  REGISTRY: ghcr.io
  IMAGE_NAME: ${{ github.repository }}

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        node-version: [18.x, 20.x]

    steps:
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Fail fast with early validation
• Run tests in parallel when possible
• Use caching for dependencies
• Implement proper secret management
• Gate production deployments with approval
• Monitor and alert on pipeline failures
• Use consistent environment configuration
• Implement infrastructure as code

❌ DON'T

• Store credentials in pipeline configuration
• Deploy without automated tests
• Skip security scanning
• Allow long-running pipelines
• Mix staging and production pipelines
• Ignore test failures
• Deploy directly to main branch
• Skip health checks after deployment