CI/CD for NestJS with GitHub Actions

NestJS ships unit and e2e test suites out of the box, and both belong in CI before a build and deploy.

This recipe wires a NestJS app into GitHub Actions. It runs lint, unit tests, and e2e tests against a Postgres service, then builds the app with nest build and deploys on main.

What the pipeline does

npm ci
Lint
Unit tests (jest)
e2e tests against Postgres
nest build
Deploy on main

The workflow

NestJS scaffolds test:e2e separately from test, so run both.

.github/workflows/ci.yml

name: CI
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    services:
      postgres:
        image: postgres:16
        env:
          POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres
          POSTGRES_DB: nest_test
        ports: ["5432:5432"]
        options: >-
          --health-cmd "pg_isready -U postgres"
          --health-interval 10s
          --health-timeout 5s
          --health-retries 5
    env:
      DATABASE_URL: postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/nest_test
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: '20'
          cache: npm
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm run lint
      - run: npm run test
      - run: npm run test:e2e
      - run: npm run build
  deploy:
    needs: test
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: '20'
          cache: npm
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm run build
      - run: npm run deploy

Testing against a database

The e2e suite typically boots the full Nest application, so it needs a live database. The postgres service container is reachable at localhost:5432; set DATABASE_URL and let TypeORM or Prisma run migrations during app bootstrap or a pretest step. Use a dedicated nest_test database so e2e runs never collide with unit-test fixtures.

Deploying

After nest build emits dist/, deploy that bundle. Common targets are a container image pushed to a registry, a serverless adapter (Lambda via @nestjs/platform-express), or a PaaS. Keep secrets in GitHub secrets and inject them at deploy time.

Key takeaways

Run both npm run test and npm run test:e2e - Nest separates them.
e2e tests need a real Postgres service container.
Build with nest build and deploy the dist/ output on main.