Playbook
Your first CI/CD pipeline
A minimum viable release path for a small team — good enough to ship daily without heroics.
Minimum viable release path
A clean CI/CD baseline you can extend later: build + test on every PR, stage like production, and ship with a safe rollback plan.
1. Start with CI only
Lint, unit tests, and build artifacts on every pull request. No deploy until green is habitual.
2. One staging environment
Mirror production topology at smaller scale. Same env var names, same migration step, same health check URL pattern.
3. Secrets never in the repo
Use your CI provider's secret store or cloud parameter store. Inject at runtime; rotate if anything ever hit git history.
4. Add CD with a manual approval
Auto-deploy to staging on main; production behind a button or tag. Include a rollback job that redeploys the previous artifact.
5. Observability minimum
- Build and deploy notifications in Slack
- Link to logs from the deploy summary
- Smoke test step that fails the pipeline if health check fails