🧠 Cursor Rule — Scaffold CI/CD Workflows

Summary

Create automated CI/CD workflows that validate each change through type checks, tests, and reproducible builds. A reliable CI pipeline ensures safe deployments and reduces production regressions.

Objectives

• Ensure each commit passes linting, typing, and tests
• Detect regressions early through automated checks
• Produce consistent build artifacts
• Enable safe staged deployments with minimal risk

Principles

1. CI must prove correctness before merging.

2. Pipelines should be deterministic and documented.

3. Deployments should be small, observable, and reversible.

4. CI output should make debugging straightforward.

Implementation Pattern

Step 1: Outline pipeline stages.

Include static analysis, type checking, unit tests, integration tests, artifact generation, and deployment steps.

Step 2: Scaffold workflow files for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or another system.

Use shared templates for linting, testing, and building.

Step 3: Make stages parallel and incremental where possible to reduce run times.

Step 4: Add deployment safety features.

Use health checks, canary releases, and approval gates when needed.

Step 5: Validate workflows using local runners or Cursor’s execution capabilities.

Bug Prevention Examples

• Type errors caught in CI instead of appearing in production.
• Environment mismatches discovered through reproducible runners.
• Dangerous SQL migrations prevented through dry-run validation.

Anti-Pattern (Before)

Developers run ad-hoc scripts locally and manually deploy code, resulting in inconsistent builds and untested changes reaching production.

Recommended Pattern (After)

A standardized workflow where pull requests trigger linting, typing, and tests, while merges create artifacts and deploy safely to staging or production.

Best Practices

• Keep pipelines fast by running heavy tests only on merge.
• Cache dependencies to reduce job duration.
• Store artifacts for traceability.
• Align local development commands with CI commands.

Cursor Prompts

"Create a CI workflow with linting, typing, tests, and safe deployment steps."

"Add a canary deployment strategy with rollback support."

"Set up caching and parallel execution to optimize CI time."

Notes

CI/CD is essential to maintaining reliability and enabling rapid iteration across teams.