ghaymah-exam-mohammedhamdy-sre/q3-cicd

Q3 – CI/CD Pipeline on Ghaymah Cloud

Overview

This task implements a complete CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions and Ghaymah Cloud.

The pipeline automatically builds the application, performs a smoke test, deploys to the staging environment for development changes, and deploys to the production environment after merging into the main branch with manual approval enabled.

---

Pipeline Workflow

Developer
    │
    │ Push
    ▼
GitHub Repository
    │
    ▼
GitHub Actions
    │
    ├── Build Docker Image
    ├── Smoke Test (/health)
    │
    ├──────────────┐
    │              │
    ▼              ▼
develop         main
    │              │
Deploy          Manual Approval
Staging             │
                    ▼
             Deploy Production

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CI Pipeline

The Continuous Integration stage performs:

• Checkout repository
• Build Docker image
• Start container
• Execute smoke test
• Verify /health endpoint
• Stop and remove the test container

This ensures that only healthy builds continue to deployment.

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CD Pipeline

Staging Deployment

Triggered automatically when code is pushed to the develop branch.

Steps:

1. Install Ghaymah CLI
2. Authenticate using GitHub Secrets
3. Load .ghaymah.staging.json
4. Deploy application to the staging environment

Purpose:

• Integration testing
• Validation before production
• Detect deployment issues early

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Production Deployment

Triggered after merging into the main branch.

Deployment requires manual approval through the GitHub Environment protection rules before execution.

Steps:

1. Install Ghaymah CLI
2. Authenticate using GitHub Secrets
3. Load .ghaymah.production.json
4. Deploy application to the production environment

Purpose:

• Stable release
• Manual verification before deployment
• Reduce production risks

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Pipeline Evidence

The following screenshots demonstrate successful execution of the CI/CD pipeline and deployment for both Staging and Production environments.

Staging Pipeline

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Production Pipeline

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Deployment Verification

The following screenshot confirms that both Staging and Production applications were successfully deployed on Ghaymah Cloud.

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Staging vs Production

Staging	Production
Testing environment	Live environment
Used by developers	Used by end users
Automatic deployment	Protected deployment
Safe for validation	High availability
Can be updated frequently	Only verified releases

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Manual Approval

Production deployments are protected using GitHub Environments.

The workflow pauses before deploying to production until manual approval is granted.

Benefits:

• Prevent accidental deployments
• Final verification before release
• Safer production deployments

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Ghaymah CLI Integration

Deployment is performed using the official Ghaymah CLI.

Installation:

curl -sSL https://cli.ghaymah.systems/install.sh | bash

Authentication:

gy auth login \
  --email "<EMAIL>" \
  --password "<PASSWORD>"

Deployment:

cp .ghaymah.production.json .ghaymah.json
gy resource app launch

For the staging environment, the workflow uses:

cp .ghaymah.staging.json .ghaymah.json

before deployment.

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GitHub Secrets

Sensitive credentials are stored securely as GitHub Secrets.

Secrets used:

• GHAYMAH_EMAIL
• GHAYMAH_PW

No credentials are stored inside the repository.

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Technologies Used

• GitHub Actions
• Docker
• Ghaymah Cloud
• Ghaymah CLI
• GitHub Environments
• GitHub Secrets

---

Result

The pipeline successfully provides:

• Automated Docker image build
• Automated smoke testing
• Automatic deployment to the Staging environment
• Manual approval before Production deployment
• Secure deployment using GitHub Secrets
• Production deployment using Ghaymah CLI

This implementation demonstrates a complete production-ready CI/CD workflow following modern DevOps and SRE best practices.