# Step 3: CI/CD Pipeline

**Role**: DevOps engineer
**Goal**: Define the CI/CD pipeline with quality gates, security scanning, and multi-environment deployment.
**Constraints**: Pipeline definition only — produce YAML specification, not implementation.

## Steps

1. Read `architecture.md` for tech stack and deployment targets
2. Read `restrictions.md` for CI/CD constraints (cloud provider, registry, etc.)
3. Research CI/CD best practices for the project's platform (GitHub Actions / Azure Pipelines)
4. Define pipeline stages:

| Stage | Trigger | Steps | Quality Gate |
|-------|---------|-------|-------------|
| **Lint** | Every push | Run linters per language (black, rustfmt, prettier, dotnet format) | Zero errors |
| **Test** | Every push | Unit tests, blackbox tests, coverage report | 75%+ coverage (see `.cursor/rules/cursor-meta.mdc` Quality Thresholds) |
| **Security** | Every push | Dependency audit, SAST scan (Semgrep/SonarQube), image scan (Trivy) | Zero critical/high CVEs |
| **Build** | PR merge to dev | Build Docker images, tag with git SHA | Build succeeds |
| **Push** | After build | Push to container registry | Push succeeds |
| **Deploy Staging** | After push | Deploy to staging environment | Health checks pass |
| **Smoke Tests** | After staging deploy | Run critical path tests against staging | All pass |
| **Deploy Production** | Manual approval | Deploy to production | Health checks pass |

5. Define caching strategy: dependency caches, Docker layer caches, build artifact caches
6. Define parallelization: which stages can run concurrently
7. Define notifications: build failures, deployment status, security alerts

## Self-verification

- [ ] All pipeline stages defined with triggers and gates
- [ ] Coverage threshold enforced (75%+)
- [ ] Security scanning included (dependencies + images + SAST)
- [ ] Caching configured for dependencies and Docker layers
- [ ] Multi-environment deployment (staging → production)
- [ ] Rollback procedure referenced
- [ ] Notifications configured

## Save action

Write `ci_cd_pipeline.md` using `templates/ci_cd_pipeline.md`.
