A build pipelint is any automated process that can take your changes at least some of the way from your text editor to production.
This is an example Make build script. Make isn't the prettiest or shiniest build system but it definitely works having been used for the best part of forever. In this script, we'll run CSS Lint then, if that passes, deploy the file to our website.
project_directory/
Makefile
/source (where we edit our files)
/css
/images
index.html
/deploy (the live website)
This also assumes you have csslint available globally.
The contents of our file:
TOP := $(dir $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)))
source_dir = $(TOP)source
deploy_dir = $(TOP)deploy
syntaxcheck:
csslint $(source_dir)
publish:
rm -rf $(deploy_dir)
mkdir -p $(deploy_dir)
cp -R $(source_dir)/* $(deploy_dir)/
build: syntaxcheck publish
That's it. It's not a very good Makefile nor is it generally good practice to delete your entire website before deploying but it shows the basics. To run it, simply type:
make build
Make will look in the Makefile for the build stage and see that it should run the syntaxcheck stage. It then runs csslint on the /source directory. If this fails, the build process will stop and nothing will be deployed. If this passes, Make runs the next stage in the list: publish. You can be confident that if the build pipeline gets as far as publishing, all the tests you want run have passed successfully.