From theory to a green checkmark
You know what a pipeline does, now let's build one. By the end of this article you'll have a working CI pipeline that runs on every push and every pull request, installs your dependencies, lints your code, runs your tests, and shows a green checkmark (or a red X) right in the GitHub UI. It's free, it ships with every GitHub repo, and you can have it running in ten minutes.
We'll build it up one piece at a time so nothing is a black box. Each code block is a real, working .github/workflows/*.yml file, copy them straight into a repo.
Note: Who this is for: Anyone with a GitHub repo and basic Git who's never written a workflow file. The examples use a Node.js project (npm), but the structure is identical for Python, Go, or anything else, only the install/test commands change. If you've read CI/CD Fundamentals, you have all the background you need.
The vocabulary you need (just five words)
