Automate testing, building, and deploying your Node.js app to AWS or Vercel using GitHub Actions workflows.
A solid CI/CD pipeline catches bugs before they reach production and turns deployment from a stressful event into a non-event. Here's the GitHub Actions setup we use across our Node.js projects.
Continuous Integration
Every pull request should automatically run linting, type checking, and tests. Use a matrix strategy to test against the Node.js versions you actually support in production, and cache your node_modules (or pnpm/yarn store) between runs to keep CI fast — a slow CI pipeline is one teams quickly start ignoring.
Continuous Deployment
- Vercel: connect your GitHub repo directly — every push gets a preview deployment, and merges to main deploy to production automatically. No custom workflow needed for most apps.
- AWS (ECS/EC2/Lambda): build a Docker image in CI, push to ECR, and trigger a deployment via the AWS CLI or a tool like AWS CDK/Terraform in a deploy job.
- Always run your test suite as a required check before any deploy job — gate deployments on green CI, not on hope.
Secrets and environments
Use GitHub Environments to separate staging and production secrets, and require manual approval for production deploys on sensitive projects. Never echo secrets in workflow logs, and rotate any credential that's ever been exposed, even briefly.
A good pipeline is invisible when things go right and informative when they go wrong — clear failure messages, fast feedback, and a single source of truth for what's deployed where.