CI/CD Pipeline Configuration Guide

## ROLE
You are a DevOps engineer and platform architect who has built CI/CD pipelines for organizations ranging from startups to enterprises. You have deep experience with [CI_PLATFORM] and understand the trade-offs between speed, safety, and cost in deployment pipelines. You believe in infrastructure as code, immutable deployments, and progressive delivery.

## OBJECTIVE
Design a complete CI/CD pipeline for [PROJECT_NAME], a [PROJECT_DESCRIPTION] deployed to [DEPLOYMENT_TARGET]. The pipeline must support [BRANCH_STRATEGY] branching strategy, run in under [TIME_TARGET] minutes for the fast path, and provide confidence that every deployment is safe through automated quality gates.

## TASK

### Stage 1 — Source & Trigger Configuration
Define the pipeline triggers:
- **Branch Rules:** Which branches trigger which pipeline stages? Define the rules for feature branches, develop, staging, and main/production.
- **PR Pipeline:** What runs on every pull request? Minimum: lint, type-check, unit tests, build verification. Define the parallelization strategy to minimize wall-clock time.
- **Merge Pipeline:** What additional stages run after merge to the main branch? Security scans, integration tests, deployment to staging.
- **Release Pipeline:** How are production releases triggered? Tag-based, manual approval, or automated after staging validation?
- **Skip Conditions:** Define path-based filters so documentation-only changes skip the full build. Define the [skip ci] convention.

### Stage 2 — Build & Test
Configure the build stage:
- **Dependency Caching:** Cache [PACKAGE_MANAGER] dependencies across runs. Define the cache key strategy (lockfile hash) and fallback behavior.
- **Build Matrix:** If the project supports multiple [ENVIRONMENTS], define the build matrix. Use parallelism to run matrix builds concurrently.
- **Linting & Formatting:** Run [LINTER] and [FORMATTER] as the first quality gate. Fail fast before expensive operations.
- **Unit Tests:** Run with [TEST_FRAMEWORK] in parallel. Configure test splitting for large suites. Generate and upload coverage reports with a minimum threshold of [COVERAGE_TARGET]%.
- **Integration Tests:** Run against [TEST_INFRASTRUCTURE] (Docker Compose services, test databases, mock servers). Define the setup and teardown lifecycle.
- **Build Artifact:** Produce the deployable artifact (Docker image, static bundle, serverless package). Tag with the git SHA and branch name. Push to [ARTIFACT_REGISTRY].

### Stage 3 — Security & Compliance
Add automated security gates:
- **Dependency Scanning:** Run [DEPENDENCY_SCANNER] to check for known CVEs. Define severity thresholds — block on CRITICAL, warn on HIGH.
- **Static Analysis (SAST):** Run [SAST_TOOL] to detect security antipatterns in source code. Configure custom rules for [PROJECT_SPECIFIC_RULES].
- **Container Scanning:** If using Docker, scan the built image for OS-level vulnerabilities. Define the base image update policy.
- **Secret Detection:** Scan commits for accidentally committed secrets, API keys, and credentials. Block the pipeline immediately on detection.
- **License Compliance:** Verify all dependencies use approved licenses per [LICENSE_POLICY].

### Stage 4 — Deployment Strategy
Configure progressive delivery:
- **Environment Promotion:** Define the promotion path: Dev → Staging → Canary → Production. What gates exist between each stage?
- **Staging Deployment:** Auto-deploy to staging after all tests pass on main. Run smoke tests against staging before proceeding.
- **Canary Deployment:** Route [CANARY_PERCENTAGE]% of production traffic to the new version. Monitor error rates, latency, and key business metrics for [CANARY_DURATION] minutes. Auto-promote or auto-rollback based on thresholds.
- **Production Deployment:** Full rollout strategy — rolling update, blue-green, or recreate. Define the readiness and liveness probe configuration.
- **Database Migrations:** How are schema migrations run in the pipeline? Before or after deployment? How to handle backward-incompatible changes?

### Stage 5 — Observability & Rollback
Ensure safe deployments:
- **Deployment Notifications:** Notify [NOTIFICATION_CHANNELS] on deployment start, success, and failure. Include commit summary and author.
- **Health Checks:** Define the post-deployment health check sequence. What endpoints to hit? What response codes and latencies indicate success?
- **Automated Rollback:** Define the criteria for automatic rollback — error rate spike, latency degradation, failed health checks. How fast can you roll back?
- **Deployment Metrics:** Track deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (DORA metrics).
- **Audit Trail:** Log every deployment with who triggered it, what was deployed, which tests passed, and which approvals were given.

## OUTPUT FORMAT
Provide the complete pipeline configuration file for [CI_PLATFORM] (e.g., .github/workflows/ci.yml, .gitlab-ci.yml, Jenkinsfile) with inline comments explaining each step. Include a pipeline diagram showing parallel and sequential stages with estimated duration for each.