CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub Actions for Web Applications

What is CI/CD?

Continuous Integration (CI) automatically tests every code push. Continuous Deployment (CD) automatically deploys passing builds to production. Together, they eliminate manual deployment steps and catch bugs before they reach users.

GitHub Actions Workflow

Create .github/workflows/deploy.yml:

name: Build & Deploy
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 22
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm run lint
      - run: npm run build
      - run: npm run test
  deploy:
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm run build
      - uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./dist

Adding Linting and Type Checks

Always include npm run lint and npm run typecheck in your CI pipeline. These catch formatting issues, unused imports, and type errors before they reach production.

Deployment Targets

GitHub Actions can deploy to Vercel, Netlify, AWS S3+CloudFront, any VPS via SSH, or Kubernetes clusters. The flexibility makes it the go-to CI/CD tool for modern web teams.