Pipelines as code & quality gates

P36.pipelines-as-code.01 · Audience: guest, it-ml, language-pro

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Once a project is packaged, the next question is: what stops broken code from shipping? A CI pipeline — declared as code, run on every push, enforced as the gate on a merge. This module has you write a real GitHub Actions workflow and run it through a CI simulator, so the mechanics — gate ordering and fail-fast — are yours.

Step 1 / 3Declared, not scripted
ⓘ Concept: A workflow is data the runner executes
A GitHub Actions workflow is a YAML file listing jobs, each with the jobs it needs (its gate) and the steps it runs. You declare the what; the runner works out the order. Because it's a file in the repo, it's reviewed like any change — and the same checks run locally and in CI.

Why it matters — A pipeline that lives in the repo is versioned and reviewed like code — one source of truth for what 'good' means, not steps clicked together in a UI.

This repo's own workflow gates every change with one make quality job — the pipeline that gated this very lesson:

name: vnext-ci
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  quality:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: make quality
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🎓 Practice ladder

2 graded rungs · ~26 min

Author a real Actions workflow and run it through the CI simulator, then design a pipeline in an interview-style prompt.

Rung 1 — a pipeline as code (real YAML, simulated run)

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Rung 2 — CI pipelines & quality gates (interview)

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One pipeline, one environment — so far. The next module fans it out across a matrix of versions and platforms, and decides which build actually ships.