Engineering a CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions and AWS EC2 published

Introduction

As developers and infrastructure engineers, we strive to eliminate repetitive manual tasks. When it came time to host my interactive, terminal-themed portfolio website, running manual file transfers or standard SSH updates felt like a missed architectural opportunity.

I wanted a modern engineering workflow: write code locally, push to a remote repository, and let automated pipelines handle the heavy lifting.

Here is a comprehensive technical breakdown of how I designed and engineered a lean Continuous Deployment (CD) pipeline utilizing GitHub Actions and an AWS EC2 infrastructure, along with the real-world debugging lessons I learned along the way.

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🔗 Check out the complete codebase and workflow configurations on GitHub.

The Architectural Blueprint

The pipeline is built on an automated, event-driven loop that links a local development environment to an active production server in the cloud:

mermaid
graph LR
    Dev[\"💻 Local Workspace (WSL)"/] -- git push --> Repo[("(fa:fa-github) GitHub Remote Repo")]
    Repo ==> Trigger{{"⚡ Workflow Runner Trigger"}}
    GHA[["🔧 job: deploy_site"]] --- Secrets[/"🔑 GitHub Encrypted Secrets"\]
    Trigger --> GHA
    GHA -- Secure SSH Tunnel --> EC2["🐧 AWS EC2 Ubuntu Instance"]
    EC2 -- git fetch & hard reset --> App[/"📁 Apache Root (/var/www/html)"/]
    App == Deployment Status 200 OK ==> Web(("🌐 Production Live Site"))

    style Dev fill:#eceff1,stroke:#37474f,stroke-width:2px
    style Repo fill:#e1f5fe,stroke:#0288d1,stroke-width:2px
    style Trigger fill:#fff3e0,stroke:#f57c00,stroke-width:2px
    style GHA fill:#ede7f6,stroke:#5e35b1,stroke-width:2px
    style Secrets fill:#ffebee,stroke:#c62828,stroke-width:1px,stroke-dasharray: 5 5
    style EC2 fill:#efebe9,stroke:#4e342e,stroke-width:2px
    style App fill:#e8f5e9,stroke:#2e7d32,stroke-width:2px
    style Web fill:#e8f8f5,stroke:#117a65,stroke-width:3px