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← Back to trackModule: GitHub Actions in Practice

INTERMEDIATE · Medium · 70m

Your first production-grade workflow

CI/CD: Starter to Shipping

Lesson notes

Goal

Create a workflow that is secure, repeatable, and deploy-ready.

A clean workflow structure

.github/workflows/
  ci.yml
  deploy.yml

Keep CI separate from deploy if possible.

Key things to get right

  • least privilege permissions
  • secrets from GitHub Secrets (never in repo)
  • cache dependencies
  • run on pull_request and push to main

Minimal example (Node)

name: CI
on:
  pull_request:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 20
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm run lint
      - run: npm run build

Deploy safety

  • use environments (staging/prod)
  • add manual approval for prod
  • deploy only from main or tags

Next Step

Learn how to debug failures quickly and reduce pipeline downtime.

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