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The smallest useful CI setup: a handful of tests labeled critical run on every pull request, and one failure blocks the merge. This recipe keeps the gate fast (minutes, not a full suite) and strict (a real failure stops the merge).

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The tests

Label the flows whose failure means “do not ship”:
tests/critical/checkout.test.yaml
Keep the critical label under roughly ten tests. Every test in the gate is a flow you would roll back for: sign-in, checkout, the primary write action. Edge cases belong in the nightly suite, not the gate.

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The workflow

The job installs momentic from devDependencies, so your lockfile pins the CLI version. Add it once with npm install -D momentic.
.github/workflows/critical-path.yml
  • --labels critical runs only labeled tests. --upload-results attaches the run group to the dashboard so a failure links to video and traces from the PR check.
  • -y skips confirmation prompts in CI.

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Make it required

In GitHub, add the job’s check name (Critical flows / test) to the branch protection’s required status checks. Until then the gate is advisory.

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Flake policy for a gate

A gate that flakes trains people to click “re-run” instead of reading the failure. Two controls:
  • Quarantine. A quarantined test still runs but does not fail the check by default. Use --skip-quarantined to drop them from the gate entirely, or --ignore-quarantine for maximum strictness. See quarantine.
  • Retries. --retries 1 gives a failing test one more run; more than one retry in a gate hides real problems.

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Slow gate

Swap --labels critical for AI test selection (--ai-select --ai-select-base origin/main) so the PR only runs the tests that cover its diff. See Common CI setups for the deployment-triggered variant.