CI/CD Pipeline: Automating Your Deployment Workflow

CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) automates testing and deployment. This guide covers setting up pipelines with GitHub Actions.

## What is CI/CD?

- **CI**: Automatically build and test code on every push
- **CD**: Automatically deploy tested code to production

## GitHub Actions Basics

```yaml
# .github/workflows/ci.yml
name: CI Pipeline
on:
 push:
   branches: [main]
 pull_request:
   branches: [main]
jobs:
 test:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   steps:
   - uses: actions/checkout@v4
   - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
     with:
       node-version: 20
   - run: npm install
   - run: npm test
   - run: npm run build
```

## Multi-Stage Pipeline

```yaml
jobs:
 lint:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   steps:
   - run: npm run lint

 test:
   needs: lint
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   steps:
   - run: npm test

 deploy:
   needs: test
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
   steps:
   - name: Deploy
     run: ./deploy.sh
```

## Environment Variables

```yaml
- name: Deploy
 env:
   API_KEY: ${{ secrets.API_KEY }}
   DEPLOY_URL: ${{ vars.DEPLOY_URL }}
 run: ./deploy.sh
```

## Best Practices

1. Run tests on every PR
2. Deploy only from main branch
3. Use secrets for sensitive data
4. Cache dependencies for speed
5. Monitor pipeline failures

## Conclusion

CI/CD catches bugs early and ships features faster. Start with simple pipelines and evolve as your team grows.