Our CI pipeline builds, runs the unit tests, packages it up and deploys it to the "smoke test" (dev) environment, and if that succeeds and the site is running, it deploys the code to a QA environment and Canopy/Selenium acceptance tests are run.

If those pass, a release master can elect to push the code to prod.

I'm just starting to learn about devops, so this might be a stupid question. Does anyone here have a pipeline step where they try running a program?

Let's say that hypothetically we have a C++ Qt application that uses configuration files. I would like to check if the application starts successfully without failing.

I was thinking of using the "timeout" Linux command.

Is this something that you would do?

Try running application as part of CI pipeline