Building a Production-Grade CI/CD Pipeline — Part 1: Setting Up From Scratch

Most CI/CD tutorials show you how to deploy a hello-world app. This one doesn't. By the end of this series, you'll have a pipeline that builds, tests, scans for security vulnerabilities using AI, and enforces cost guardrails before anything reaches production. The kind of pipeline that actually runs in a real engineering org.

But before we get there, we start at the very beginning. No assumed knowledge. No skipped steps.

Let's build it.

What We're Building

Across three articles, we're building a complete GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline for a Node.js API. Here's the full picture:

Part 1: Push → Lint → Test → Build → Deploy to StagingPart 2: AI Security Scan → Block on Critical Findings → Slack AlertPart 3: Infracost Check → Cost Delta Report → Budget Gate

By the end of Part 3, you'll have a pipeline that any platform engineering team would be proud to call...

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