Developer Uncovers Six Stacked CI/CD Bugs That Silently Blocked Auto-Deploys for Weeks

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A developer discovered that a GitHub Actions deployment pipeline connected to a DigitalOcean droplet had never successfully triggered automated deploys, forcing manual SSH intervention every time. Investigation revealed the deploy job was correctly gated on CI passing, but CI had never gone green on the main branch due to multiple unrelated failures. Two immediate blockers were a gitignored .python-version file that prevented the linter from running and a Node.js version mismatch causing frontend tests to crash before execution, since jsdom required Node 22 or higher while CI was pinned to Node 20. Fixing those two issues with a minimal code change brought pytest and frontend tests to green, but then exposed a third layer of failures caused by accumulated code formatting drift across several files that pre-commit hooks had never enforced locally. The incident highlighted how independent infrastructure misconfigurations can stack and obscure one another, with failures and skipped jobs scattered across separate UI tabs making the root causes easy to overlook.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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