In modern DevOps workflows, GitOps has emerged as a powerful model for managing infrastructure and application deployments using Git as the single source of truth. One common challenge in GitOps is how to promote changes across environments - from staging to production - while maintaining traceability, automation, and control. In this post, we’ll explore how to implement environment promotions using GitHub Releases and Semantic Versioning (SemVer) to streamline delivery and improve reliability.

This approach is tailored for small and mid-sized teams that want to implement reliable, controlled GitOps promotions without the overhead of enterprise-scale CI/CD systems.

Recently I worked on a Django project where I built a Django API using DRF, but I also was responsible for the infrastructure setup. Setting up a baseline Django project was easy due to the Django cookiecutter, but for the CI/CD setup the path was not as straight forward. Overtime, I’ve found a large ecosystem of tools that format, lint and test Django/Python projects very well. Getting a good CI suite with GitHub Actions was easy due to the ecosystem of formatting, linting and testing tools, but there was no blog post/guide on the all the various tools available. Therefore, I thought of sharing all the various actions we’re using to ensure the highest code standard as possible using these tools.