A homemade CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions

In the previous article on hosting a Next.js app on a VPS , I'd left the deployment pipeline as a rough sketch: four lines to say "it ships to production on its own when you push." That's the piece I want to open up here, because it's what separates a VPS you fuss over by hand from infrastructure you can forget about. There's a stubborn myth that CI/CD is a big-company thing, with a dedicated DevOps team and six-figure tooling. Not true. The pipeline that deploys this portfolio fits in two YAML files, you can read it in five minutes, and it gives me back exactly the comfort I liked about Vercel: I push to master , I go grab a coffee, the app is live when I'm back. The one thing I gained along the way is knowing precisely what happens between the git push and the running container. Four steps, in this order Deployment is a chain. On every push to master , GitHub Actions runs lint, security scan, image build, and deploy. What matters is the needs : as long as a step fails, the following ones don't start. A critical vulnerability caught by the scan, and the image never gets built. At all. jobs : lint : # ESLint runs-on : ubuntu-latest # ... security : # Trivy scan (reusable workflow) uses : ./.github/workflows/security.yml build-push : # build the Docker image → push to GHCR needs : [ lint , security ] # ... deploy : # SSH to the VPS → docker compose pull && up -d needs : [ build-push ] # ... Lint first, because it's the cheapest step and there's no point building an image if ESLint is already screaming. The scan next, as a barrier. Then the build, which produces the Docker image and pushes it to GHCR, GitHub's container registry (private, in my case). And finally the deploy, which connects over SSH to the VPS, pulls the new image and restarts the container. Four links, each blocking the next. That's the whole secret. The security scan is in the path, not in a review "for later" This is the one I won't budge on. Dependency security, in a lot of projects, is a Dependabo