CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. This is the modern standard practice for developer teams — automating the testing of code changes and deploying them to production. It saves developer time and reduces errors.
What CI/CD gives you
Automated testing — every code change kicks off automated tests (unit, integration, e2e). If tests fail, the deploy doesn't happen.
Fast deploys — from a commit to production in minutes. Manual deploys used to take 1-2 hours.
Consistency — every deploy runs the same way, no chance for manual error.
Rollback — if a bug is found, you can quickly revert to the previous version.
CI/CD pipeline stages
Source — code source (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket repository).
Build — code compilation (Composer install, npm build), assets bundling.
Test — automated tests — unit, integration, e2e (Cypress, Playwright).
Deploy — ship to staging and production environments.
Monitor — post-deploy monitoring (Sentry, Datadog).
Main tools
GitHub Actions — the most popular (bundled with GitHub). YAML configuration. 2000 minutes per month free for public repositories.
GitLab CI/CD — bundled with GitLab repositories. YAML configuration.
Jenkins — self-hosted, most powerful. But complex to set up and maintain.
CircleCI, Travis CI, BitBucket Pipelines — other alternatives.
Simple GitHub Actions example
.github/workflows/deploy.yml file:
name: Deploy to Production
on:
push:
branches: [main]
jobs:
deploy:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Run tests
run: composer test
- name: Deploy
uses: SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@v4
with:
server: ${{ secrets.FTP_SERVER }}
username: ${{ secrets.FTP_USERNAME }}
password: ${{ secrets.FTP_PASSWORD }}
Sayt.uz practice
6% of Sayt.uz clients run a full CI/CD pipeline (mostly IT companies and custom Laravel/Node.js projects). 47 sites deploy via GitHub Actions. Sayt.uz hosting doesn't have CI/CD-specific support, but standard SFTP/SSH integration works. Tip: CI/CD is unnecessary for WordPress, but if your developer team is 3+ people, automating tests and deploys is very valuable.