pipeline-patterns

Pipeline Patterns

Design robust CI/CD pipelines with clear stage separation, proper artifact flow, environment promotion, quality gates, and failure handling.

When to Use

• User designs a new CI/CD pipeline
• User asks about build, test, deploy stage organization
• User needs environment promotion (dev -> staging -> prod)
• User wants to optimize pipeline speed with parallelism
• User asks about quality gates or approval workflows

Core Patterns

Pipeline Stage Architecture

Structure pipelines in clear stages with explicit dependencies and artifact passing.

Build --> Lint --|
                |--> Integration Tests --> Deploy Staging --> E2E Tests --> Deploy Prod
         Unit --|

# GitHub Actions implementation
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    outputs:
      image-tag: ${{ steps.meta.outputs.tags }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - id: meta
        uses: docker/metadata-action@v5
        with:
          images: ghcr.io/${{ github.repository }}
          tags: type=sha
      - uses: docker/build-push-action@v5
        with:
          push: true
          tags: ${{ steps.meta.outputs.tags }}

  lint:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm run lint

  unit-test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm test

  integration-test:
    needs: [build, lint, unit-test]
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    services:
      postgres:
        image: postgres:16
        env: { POSTGRES_DB: test, POSTGRES_PASSWORD: test }
        options: --health-cmd pg_isready --health-interval 5s --health-retries 5
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm run test:integration

  deploy-staging:
    needs: integration-test
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: staging
    steps:
      - run: echo "Deploy ${{ needs.build.outputs.image-tag }} to staging"

  e2e-test:
    needs: deploy-staging
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npx playwright test --project=staging

  deploy-production:
    needs: e2e-test
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment:
      name: production
      url: https://myapp.com
    steps:
      - run: echo "Deploy ${{ needs.build.outputs.image-tag }} to production"