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Hectal
Phase 1Beginner2 of 9 in CI/CD

CI Fundamentals

What actually starts a pipeline, what a real build-and-test stage looks like, and the two techniques that make slow pipelines fast again.

Topic 0.4 got one minimal pipeline running. This phase covers the four ideas that turn that minimal example into something a real team would actually rely on every day: what triggers it, what a genuinely useful test stage looks like, caching so it doesn't get painfully slow, and running things in parallel so a growing test suite doesn't dominate your team's time.

0/4 · 0%
4 topics ~56 min 8 code blocks & diagrams
Start with the first topic
1
1.1

Triggers: Push, Pull Request, Schedule, and Manual

A pipeline doesn't run continuously — it runs in response to a specific, configured event, and choosing the right trigger for the right job is most of what makes a pipeline's behavior actually correct.

14 min 1 diagram 1 code practice

2
1.2

Build & Test Stages Done Well

A genuinely useful test stage does more than run one command — it separates fast tests from slow ones, fails fast, and reports results in a form a human (or a required status check) can actually act on.

14 min 1 code practice

3
1.3

Caching & Speeding Up Builds

Re-downloading every dependency and rebuilding everything from scratch on every single run is genuinely wasteful — caching lets a pipeline reuse work from a previous run whenever nothing relevant has actually changed.

14 min 1 diagram 1 code practice

4
1.4

Matrix Builds & Parallel Jobs

A matrix build runs the same job multiple times with different parameters — testing across several language versions or operating systems in parallel, instead of writing a nearly-duplicated job for each one.

14 min 1 diagram 2 code practice