DevOps Project
CI/CD Pipeline
A CI/CD pipeline runs your tests, builds an artifact and deploys it every time you push, so releasing stops being an event. Building one on your own project teaches more DevOps than any tutorial, because you meet the real failures — flaky tests, secret management and a deploy that half-succeeds.
The brief
Take an application you have already built and automate its path to production. Every push runs tests and linting; every merge to main builds a container and deploys it; a failed deploy rolls back without you.
What it demonstrates
That you can automate a release safely, which is most of what a junior DevOps role actually does.
What "done" looks like
Build all of these and the project is finished. Anything past that is in the stretch goals.
- Tests and linting on every push and pull request
- A container image built and tagged on merge to main
- An automatic deploy to staging
- A gate before production
- An automatic rollback when a deploy fails its health check
- Secrets injected at runtime, never committed
How to build it
- 1
Make the build reproducible locally
One command to install, one to test, one to build. A pipeline can only automate what already works by hand.
- 2
Run tests on every push
The smallest useful pipeline. Cache dependencies so feedback arrives in under two minutes.
- 3
Add linting and type checks
Enforce in CI what you would otherwise argue about in review. Make failures block the merge.
- 4
Build and push an image
A multi-stage build, tagged with the commit SHA so any deploy is traceable to a commit.
- 5
Deploy to staging automatically
Every merge to main lands somewhere real. Staging that lags main is not staging.
- 6
Gate production and roll back
A manual approval, then a health check after deploy that reverts to the previous image if it fails.
- 7
Break it on purpose
Deploy something that fails its health check and prove the rollback works. Record it — this is the part worth showing.
Once it works
Only after the definition of done is met. Half-finished ambition reads worse than a small finished thing.
- Add a security scan of dependencies and the built image
- Add preview environments per pull request
- Publish DORA-style metrics — lead time and change failure rate
Frequently Asked Questions
Which CI system should I use?
GitHub Actions if your code is on GitHub — it needs no extra account and the free tier is generous. The concepts transfer directly to GitLab CI, CircleCI and Jenkins, which differ mainly in syntax.
How do I handle secrets?
Repository or environment secrets injected at runtime, never in the repository and never echoed to logs. Rotate them, and scope each to the fewest jobs that need it. A leaked deploy key in a public repo is found by scanners within minutes.
What makes this project stand out?
The rollback. Most people build the happy path and stop. Deliberately deploy something broken, prove it rolls back automatically, and record that in the README — it demonstrates you thought about failure, which is the whole discipline.