Introduction

If you have followed along with the homelab series, you have seen me build a Debian server from scratch, lock it down with Zero Trust tunnels, and set up high-availability DNS across two continents. The infrastructure side has been a lot of fun to learn.

But there was something that had been nagging me. Every time I pushed code to this portfolio, it deployed automatically with zero checks. No secret scanning, no security analysis, no performance gates. One bad push and the site could break — or worse, I could accidentally leak a token and not even know it.

As I have been working toward a DevOps engineering role, CI/CD pipelines have been one of those topics I kept reading about but had not actually built from scratch myself. I am the kind of person who learns best by doing — reading documentation only gets me so far.…