A well-configured CI/CD pipeline catches bugs before they reach production and removes the friction from deploying new features. GitHub Actions makes this straightforward for Django projects.
Our pipeline runs in three stages: lint, test, and deploy. The lint stage runs ruff for code formatting, mypy for type checking, and pip-audit for dependency vulnerability scanning. These fast checks provide immediate feedback on every push.
The test stage runs our Django test suite against a PostgreSQL service container. We use pytest with coverage reporting and fail the build if coverage drops below our threshold. Parallel test execution keeps the feedback loop under 3 minutes.
For deployment, we use a multi-stage approach. Pushes to main deploy to staging automatically. Production deployments require a manual approval step in the GitHub Actions workflow. Both stages build Docker images, push to ECR, and update the Kubernetes deployment.
The entire pipeline runs in under 5 minutes for most PRs, giving developers confidence that their changes are safe to merge.