CI/CD for Startups: What You Actually Need

Your Deploy Process Is Probably "git push and pray"

You described your product to Cursor, Claude, or Bolt. You iterated for a few weeks. Now you have a working app — users are signing up, the core flow works, and you're deploying by pushing to main and refreshing the browser to see if anything broke.

Maybe you SSH into a VPS and run git pull. Maybe you click "Deploy" in Vercel and hope the build passes. Maybe you don't even have that — you just push and trust that the hosting platform figures it out.

This isn't an article about CI/CD best practices from a platform team at Google. It's about the bare minimum you need to stop shipping broken code to the people who are paying you money.

Because here's the thing: when your deploy process is manual and unchecked, you will eventually push a commit that breaks signup, crashes the checkout flow, or leaks an environment variable. It's not a question of if. It's a question of how many paying users are around when it happens.

The Minimum Viable Pipeline

You don't need Kubernetes. You don't need blue-green deployments. You don't need a 200-line YAML file with matrix builds and artifact caching. You need four things:

1. A lint step that catches obvious mistakes. ESLint, Biome, whatever your vibecoded project already has configured. This catches unused variables, import errors, and syntax issues before they hit production. It takes seconds to run.

2. A build step that proves the code compiles. If you're using TypeScript — and you probably are if an AI tool generated your codebase — running npm run build catches type errors, broken imports, and missing dependencies. This is the single highest-value check you can add. It takes 30 seconds to two minutes.

3. A small set of tests that cover core flows. Not 100% coverage. Not unit tests for every utility function. Just a few smoke tests that verify: can a user sign up, does the main dashboard load, does the checkout flow complete. Even five tests that cover your critical path are worth more than zero tests.

4. Automated deployment on merge. When a PR passes checks and gets merged to main, deploy automatically. No manual steps. No SSH. No "I forgot to deploy." The code that's in main is the code that's running in production, always.

That's it. Four steps. You can set this up in an afternoon, and it will prevent the majority of production incidents that early-stage startups hit.

What Each Step Prevents

This isn't theoretical. These are real scenarios we've seen in codebases we've audited:

The build step catches silent breakage. A founder refactored a component and forgot to update one of the five files that imported it. Locally, hot reload only re-rendered the page they were looking at, so they didn't notice. In production, three other pages crashed with a white screen. A build step would have caught this in 30 seconds.

Tests catch regressions in flows you aren't looking at. A change to the database schema broke the signup flow, but the developer was testing the settings page. They deployed. New users got an error screen for six hours before anyone noticed. A single end-to-end test for signup would have flagged this before merge.

Automated deploy prevents "it works on my machine." A developer had a local environment variable that wasn't in production. The app worked perfectly on their laptop. In production, the payment integration silently failed. Automated deploys from a clean CI environment — with explicit, managed secrets — eliminate this entire class of bug.

Lint catches the stuff you stop seeing. An unused import pulled in a 200KB library. A console.log dumped user emails to the browser console. An any type masked a null reference. These aren't dramatic failures, but they accumulate into a slow, leaky codebase.

Setting It Up (It's Easier Than You Think)

Most startups are on GitHub, so GitHub Actions is the path of least resistance. Here's the approach — not a copy-paste config, but the logic you need:

Create a workflow file at .github/workflows/ci.yml. It triggers on pull requests to main and on pushes to main.

On pull requests, run three jobs in sequence: lint, build, test. If any step fails, the PR gets a red X, and you know not to merge it. Keep these jobs simple — install dependencies, run the command, done.

On push to main, add a deploy step. If you're on Vercel or Netlify, this might already happen automatically via their GitHub integration. If you're deploying to a VPS or cloud provider, your deploy step runs after the checks pass. The key is that deployment is automatic and gated behind passing checks.

Manage your secrets properly. Go to your repo's Settings, then Secrets and Variables, then Actions. Put your API keys, database URLs, and deployment credentials there — not in your code, not in a .env file committed to git. Your CI workflow references these as ${{ secrets.YOUR_SECRET_NAME }}. If you're not sure whether your codebase has hardcoded secrets, our audit checklist walks you through finding them.

Turn on branch protection. In your repo settings, require that the CI checks pass before a PR can be merged to main. This is the safety net that makes everything else work. Without it, you or a collaborator can still merge broken code by clicking the green button. With it, GitHub won't let you.

One afternoon of setup. No infrastructure expertise required. If you can write a YAML file with four steps — and your AI coding tool can absolutely help you write it — you have a deploy pipeline that's better than 90% of early-stage startups.

When to Level Up

The minimum viable pipeline covers you for a surprisingly long time. But there are clear signals that you've outgrown it:

Multiple developers are stepping on each other. Two people merge to main within minutes, and the second deploy overwrites the first person's changes or introduces a conflict that only appears in production. This is when you add preview environments — every PR gets its own temporary URL so you can test changes in isolation before they hit main. Vercel and Netlify do this out of the box.

Deploying regularly breaks things despite passing CI. Your tests pass, the build succeeds, but production still breaks. This usually means your production environment differs from your CI environment in some meaningful way. Add a staging environment that mirrors production. Deploy there first, verify, then promote to production.

You're entering regulated industries or selling to enterprise. SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001 — compliance frameworks care about your deploy process. You'll need audit logs showing who deployed what and when, artifact signing to prove builds haven't been tampered with, and separation of duties so the person who writes code isn't the same person who approves the deploy. If you're heading in this direction, we've written about shipping in regulated industries.

Traffic spikes are causing downtime during deploys. At high traffic, even a brief restart during deployment can drop requests. This is when blue-green deployments or rolling deploys become worth the added complexity. You run two identical environments, deploy to the inactive one, verify it's healthy, then switch traffic over. Zero downtime, with instant rollback if something goes wrong.

Your infrastructure is getting hard to manage manually. If you're provisioning servers, databases, and queues by clicking through cloud consoles, you'll eventually misconfigure something that takes production down. That's when infrastructure as code tools like Terraform or Pulumi earn their keep — your infrastructure is version-controlled and reproducible, just like your application code.

Don't add any of this until you need it. Premature infrastructure complexity is just as dangerous as no infrastructure at all. The minimum viable pipeline first. Everything else when the pain justifies it.

The Bottom Line

If you're vibecoding alone, you can move fast without a pipeline — until you can't. The first time a bad deploy costs you users, revenue, or a full weekend of firefighting, you'll wish you'd spent that afternoon setting up CI.

The good news: this is one of the easiest wins in engineering. Four steps, one YAML file, one afternoon. You'll sleep better on deploy days.

Related glossary terms: CI/CD · Vibecoding · Blue-Green Deployment · Infrastructure as Code · Monitoring & Observability · Containerization