A practical comparison of GitLab CI, GitHub Actions and Jenkins that skips the feature table. What actually decides the choice is where your code lives, whether the runner can reach the deploy target, and who owns the control plane at 2am. Includes the cost mechanics, the security failure modes, and a decision procedure you can run in an afternoon.
A plugin quietly reverts after every deploy and nobody knows why. That is what happens when Git and wp-admin both think they own the file tree. Here is how to build a deployment workflow where the repo is the source of truth and the database only ever travels one way.
A deploy key in GitHub secrets is a shell on your production server, handed to a container you don't control, running code from maintainers you've never met. Here's how to build the pipeline so a leaked key isn't worth much: forced commands, scoped sudo, pinned actions and a real approval gate.
A green pipeline that ships a broken build is worse than a red one. Here is how to order stages so failures surface in seconds, stop shell pipes from swallowing exit codes, and write failure output that tells the next engineer exactly what to fix.
A fresh AWS account ships wide open by default. Here are the seven decisions that make one defensible from the start — OIDC instead of static keys, encrypted state, an isolated database tier, free gateway endpoints — with a working Terraform reference implementation on GitHub.