CI/CD Pipelines and Automated Deployments with Windsurf
Learn how to set up CI and CD pipelines with AI support, debug deployment failures, and instantly deploy frontend apps using App Deploys.
In our last lesson, we took a monumental step in professionalizing our Snake game project. We brought it under git version control, automated its run script, and even used AI to help us commit the changes. We’ve mastered the art of creating and committing high-quality code.
But in any professional setting, the commit is just the beginning of the journey. What happens next? How does the code you’ve written on your machine reliably get built, tested, and prepared for users?
Too often, this process is a manual, error-prone ritual. A developer pulls the latest changes, runs npm install, then npm test, then npm run build. This manual chain is slow, inconsistent, and the source of the dreaded “well, it works on my machine” class of bugs.
The professional solution to this chaos is CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. It’s a digital assembly line for your code, an automated system that runs this entire process for every single commit, ensuring quality and consistency for the whole team. And with Windsurf, you don’t need to be a DevOps expert to build one.
Windsurf as your DevOps engineer
Building a CI/CD pipeline can feel intimidating. It often involves writing complex YAML configuration files with arcane syntax. This is where we’ll see Windsurf take on a new role: that of a seasoned DevOps engineer.
We’ll explore two distinct approaches to deployment that Windsurf facilitates:
Generating CI/CD configurations: For our complex, full stack leaderboard application, we need a robust, multi-stage pipeline. We will direct Cascade to generate a complete GitHub Actions workflow file from a simple, natural language description of our goals.
One-click app deployments: For our simpler standalone Snake game, a full CI/CD pipeline may be excessive. In this case, we use Windsurf’s built-in App Deploys feature, a streamlined, one-click tool for instantly publishing a project to a public URL, ideal for previews and sharing.
Let’s start by building our digital assembly line.
Building our digital assembly line
Our goal is to create a system that automatically builds and tests our Snake game every time we push a change to its main ...