Week 12

Spring profiles

CI/CD Concepts

GitHub Actions

Docker in CI

Deploying from a Pipeline

Quality Gates

Practice

Assignment

• Teachers

Backend Track

Week 12 Overview

Last week ended with a small ritual: run the tests, build the image, push it, click deploy. It worked, but it was a very manual process. This week we will automate takes over the process. You will build a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions that runs your tests on every pull request, blocks broken code from reaching main, packages every merged change into a Docker image on GitHub Container Registry, and tells Render to ship it — from commit to live URL with no human hands.

Along the way you will meet the machine your pipeline runs on, teach it to start PostgreSQL for your integration tests, and learn to read failed build log the way developers do. You will finish with a quality gate that catches what your tests cannot — because code that passes its tests, including code your AI assistant writes, is not automatically good code.

Learning goals

• Explain continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, and how a pipeline of staged gates protects the main branch.
• Author a GitHub Actions workflow that builds and tests a Spring Boot application on every pull request, including a PostgreSQL service container, and diagnose failures by reading CI logs.
• Extend the pipeline to build a Docker image and push it to GitHub Container Registry, tagged with both latest and the commit SHA, authenticated with the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN.
• Trigger a Render deployment from the pipeline with a deploy-hook secret, and explain how the SHA tag enables rollback.
• Add a static-analysis quality gate to the pipeline and explain why passing tests alone does not make code production-ready.

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