Practical CI/CD Pipeline Patterns for GitHub Actions and GitLab CI

Short summary

A DevOps practitioner shares lessons from building reliable CI/CD pipelines, framing the journey as a quest from fragile shell scripts to robust state-machine-style pipelines. Three core principles—idempotency, fail-fast, and environment parity—guide before-and-after YAML examples for GitHub Actions and GitLab CI covering caching, dependency management, conditional deploys, and secret handling. The post includes a traps table and practical fixes but is a general DevOps tutorial with no AI-specific content.

• •Three principles for reliable CI/CD: idempotency, fail-fast, environment parity
• •Before/after YAML snippets for GitHub Actions and GitLab CI with caching, pinned Node versions, and conditional deploys
• •Common traps table covers missing caches, default images, unguarded deploys, ignored lint failures, and hard-coded secrets

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