🚀 CI/CD Pipelines & YAML Best Practices

Lessons Learned from Real-World Azure + Bitbucket Deployments Designing CI/CD pipelines feels straightforward… until your builds become inconsistent, deployments start failing, and environment management turns messy. After working extensively with: Bitbucket Pipelines Azure App Service (Linux) Node.js backends React / Angular frontends Monorepos …I’ve gathered practical lessons that saved hours of debugging and prevented production issues. This post focuses on real-world patterns, not textbook theory. 🧱 1️⃣ Deterministic Builds Are Non-Negotiable One of the most common CI/CD mistakes: npm install ❌ Why this is risky in pipelines Can modify package-lock.json Non-reproducible builds “Works locally, fails in CI” ✅ Best Practice npm ci For deployment bundles: npm ci --omit=dev ✔ Benefits Enforces lockfile Faster installs Reproducible builds 📦 2️⃣ Don’t Ship Dev Dependencies to Production Early pipelines often bundle everything: node_modules/ ❌ Consequences Bloated artifacts Slower deployme