Workflow

CI/CD Automation

Automate tests, checks, and release steps in your pipeline.

Overview

Manual deployment processes are error-prone and time-consuming. Claude Code helps you build robust CI/CD pipelines by generating workflow configurations, automating quality checks, and orchestrating deployment steps. Whether you're using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or Jenkins, Claude can help you create pipelines that catch issues early and deploy with confidence.

When to use

Use this workflow when setting up new CI/CD pipelines, adding automated quality gates, implementing deployment strategies, troubleshooting pipeline failures, or migrating between CI/CD platforms.

Step-by-step process

List the CI/CD tasks you want to automate

Define what should happen on each trigger: code push, pull request, merge to main. Include testing, linting, security scanning, building, and deployment steps.

"Set up a GitHub Actions workflow that: runs linting and tests on every PR, builds Docker images on merge to main, runs security scans, and deploys to staging automatically."

Ask for workflow changes or new actions

Have Claude generate the pipeline configuration files with proper job dependencies, caching strategies, and environment variable handling.

"Create a .github/workflows/ci.yml file with separate jobs for lint, test, and build. Use caching for node_modules. Run tests in parallel across Node 18, 20, and 22."

Validate in a test branch

Test the pipeline in a non-production branch first to ensure it works as expected without impacting the main development workflow.

"Create a test/ci-pipeline branch and push this workflow. Monitor the Actions tab and show me any failures or warnings."

Roll out to main with monitoring

Merge the validated pipeline to main and establish monitoring and alerting for pipeline health and deployment status.

"Merge the pipeline to main. Set up notifications for pipeline failures. Add a badge to README showing build status."

Example prompts

Setting up a modern CI pipeline

"Create a GitHub Actions workflow for our Next.js app. Run Prettier check, ESLint, TypeScript checking, and Jest tests. Use pnpm for package management. Cache dependencies appropriately."

Automating deployment to multiple environments

"Set up a deployment pipeline that: deploys to staging on merge to develop, deploys to production on release tags, runs smoke tests after each deployment, and rolls back automatically if smoke tests fail."

Adding security scanning

"Add security scanning to our existing pipeline. Use npm audit for dependencies, run SAST with CodeQL, scan Docker images with Trivy, and fail the build on high-severity issues."

Optimizing pipeline performance

"Our CI pipeline takes 15 minutes to run. Analyze the workflow and suggest optimizations: better caching, job parallelization, and removing redundant steps."

Expected outputs

Updated pipeline

Complete YAML configuration files for your CI/CD platform with jobs, steps, caching, and environment variables properly configured

Automated checks

Quality gates including tests, linting, type checking, security scans, and custom validation scripts

Release notes

Automated changelog generation, version bumping, and release documentation as part of the deployment process

Deployment scripts

Infrastructure-as-code configurations, deployment scripts, and rollback procedures for safe production releases

Best practices

Start with essential checks (lint, test) before adding advanced features like deployments

Use matrix strategies to test across multiple versions, platforms, or configurations in parallel

Implement proper caching to speed up pipelines—cache dependencies, build artifacts, and test results

Fail fast by running quick checks first, saving expensive operations for after basic validation passes

Secure your pipeline with least-privilege permissions, secret scanning, and approval gates for production

Common pitfalls

Hardcoding secrets in workflow files

Solution: Always use your platform's secret management. Ask Claude: 'Show me how to properly reference secrets in this workflow without exposing them.'

Running expensive operations on every commit

Solution: Use conditional execution. Run full test suites on PR updates, but quick lint checks on every push. Deploy only on specific branches or tags.

No pipeline testing before merging

Solution: Always test workflow changes in a feature branch first. Pipeline failures on main block everyone's work.

Pro tips

Use workflow templates for consistency

""Create reusable workflow templates for our common patterns: Node.js CI, Docker builds, and Terraform deployments. Other repos should be able to reference these.""

Add pipeline status visibility

""Set up Slack notifications for pipeline failures. Include: which job failed, error message, commit author, and link to logs.""

Implement preview deployments

""For each PR, deploy a preview environment with a unique URL. Add a comment to the PR with the preview link when deployment succeeds.""

Related workflows

Test Generation Build Systems Refactoring