Building a CI/CD Pipeline From Scratch: A Practical Guide for Developers
Originally inspired by Akoode's CI/CD pipeline guide — rewritten here with more depth, code, and less hand-waving.
I've seen teams spend hours manually running tests, zipping build artifacts, SSHing into servers, and crossing fingers before every deploy. CI/CD pipelines exist to kill that workflow. This guide skips the theory lecture and gets into how to actually build one.
We'll use GitHub Actions as the CI/CD platform — it's free for public repos, tightly integrated with GitHub, and requires zero external infrastructure to get started.
What CI/CD Actually Does (Plain English)
