CircleCI YAML Examples

Production-ready .circleci/config.yml pipeline examples for CircleCI 2.1 — using orbs, workflows, and workspaces to build, test, and deploy Node.js applications.

About CircleCI config.yml

CircleCI pipelines are defined in .circleci/config.yml at the root of your repository. The file is structured around three main concepts: orbs (reusable packages of config published to the CircleCI registry), jobs (units of work that run in an isolated Docker container or virtual machine), and workflows (graphs of jobs with dependency ordering and branch filtering). CircleCI 2.1 introduced orbs and reusable config elements, making it possible to replace dozens of lines of setup commands with a single orb reference.

CircleCI's workspace feature is essential for multi-job workflows: it lets one job persist files (compiled assets, test reports, build artifacts) to a temporary store, and downstream jobs can attach that workspace to access those files without re-running earlier steps. This is analogous to GitLab CI artifacts or GitHub Actions' upload/download artifact actions.

Examples

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Orb-Based Pipeline

CircleCI 2.1 pipeline using the Node.js and AWS CLI orbs — install, test, build, and deploy to S3 with workspace persistence.

.circleci/config.yml

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