Dev Documents Full CI/CD Pipeline for Solo SaaS App, Including Three Real Failures

A developer building FoxyInvoice, a real production invoicing app, has published a detailed account of their CI/CD pipeline as part of an ongoing open-development series. The pipeline runs directly from the main branch to production with no staging environment, relying on parallel gates covering unit tests, security checks, and secret scanning before any deployment proceeds. Three real incidents are documented, including a masked build failure that kept a broken deploy running for eight hours, a zombie concurrency lock left by a cancelled job, and a YAML parsing error that caused a deploy label to match nothing. Database migrations add complexity to rollbacks, with the team opting for forward-fix patches rather than true schema reversals. The author argues that for solo developers, the greatest benefit of automated deployment is keeping the habit of shipping code frequently rather than batching changes into infrequent releases.