How a Four-Stage CI/CD Pipeline Keeps Small Projects Simple and Maintainable

A developer on DEV Community argues that most small to medium projects suffer from over-engineered CI/CD pipelines that become harder to maintain than the applications they serve. The proposed solution is a straightforward four-stage pipeline covering testing, building, pushing, and deploying, demonstrated using GitHub Actions for a Node.js app on a VPS. Key design principles include linear flow, fail-fast behavior, SHA-tagged Docker images for traceability, and idempotent deployments to ensure safety on repeated runs. Rollbacks are simplified by re-deploying a previously tagged image, with an optional manual workflow dispatch job included for that purpose. The author notes this approach addresses roughly 80% of real-world needs before more complex setups involving multiple environments become necessary.