CI/CD Pipelines

GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline configuration for repositories hosted on GitHub — automated builds on every pull request, test execution, Docker image build, security scanning and deployment to staging and production environments triggered by merge to the appropriate branch.

• Workflow files for build, test and deploy stages
• Pull request checks: lint, type check, unit tests required before merge
• Docker image build and push to container registry
• Staging deployment on merge to main branch
• Production deployment on release tag or manual approval
• Environment secrets management via GitHub Secrets
• Caching for npm/pip/cargo dependencies to speed up builds
• Build status badge in repository README

GitLab CI/CD pipeline configuration using .gitlab-ci.yml — multi-stage pipelines with build, test, security scan and deploy stages, including merge request pipelines for feature branch validation and manual approval gates before production deployment.

• Multi-stage pipeline: build → test → scan → deploy
• Merge request pipelines: run on every MR before merge
• GitLab-managed Kubernetes runner or shared runner configuration
• Dynamic environments: preview environment per merge request
• Manual gate stage for production deployment
• GitLab Container Registry integration for image storage
• Pipeline efficiency: parallel job execution and caching
• GitLab Auto DevOps as starting point with customisation

Automated build and test execution as part of the CI pipeline — running unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests and static analysis on every change, so regressions are caught before they reach staging or production.

• Unit test execution with coverage reporting
• Integration test execution against real dependencies (database, cache)
• End-to-end test execution using Playwright or Cypress
• Static analysis: ESLint, PHP_CodeSniffer, Pylint
• Type checking: TypeScript tsc, mypy
• Dependency vulnerability scanning (npm audit, Snyk)
• SAST (Static Application Security Testing) scanning
• Test result publishing and flaky test detection

Deployment strategies that eliminate downtime for user-facing applications — blue-green deployments, canary releases and rolling updates — so new versions are deployed without any period where the service is unavailable to users.

• Blue-green deployment: full switch between two identical environments
• Canary deployment: route a percentage of traffic to new version
• Rolling update: replace instances one-by-one without full restart
• Health check verification before routing traffic to new deployment
• Database migration strategy compatible with zero-downtime deploy
• Feature flag integration for deployment separate from release
• Traffic shifting via load balancer or Kubernetes ingress
• Deployment duration monitoring and alert on slow rollout

Configuration management that keeps environment-specific values (database URLs, API keys, feature flags) separate from the application code — using secrets managers, environment variables and configuration services so the same container image runs in development, staging and production with the correct configuration.

• Environment variables for all environment-specific configuration
• AWS SSM Parameter Store or HashiCorp Vault for secrets
• Docker secrets for container-level sensitive values
• Kubernetes ConfigMap and Secret for container configuration
• No secrets in code, Dockerfiles or CI configuration files
• Secret rotation process and tooling
• Configuration drift detection between environments
• Developer onboarding: .env.example with all required variables documented

Release management and rollback capability so that a bad deployment can be reversed quickly without data loss — with immutable container images, tagged releases, database migration reversibility and a documented rollback procedure that can be executed under pressure.

• Immutable container images tagged with git SHA or semver
• Previous image version available for immediate rollback
• One-command rollback procedure documented and tested
• Database migration reversibility: down migrations for every up
• Release tag convention: semver with changelog per release
• Release notes generated from conventional commit messages
• Deployment log: who deployed what version when
• Post-deployment monitoring window before marking deploy stable