How to Perform Smoke Testing From the Command Line

Production smoke testing is presented as a post-deployment gate that verifies not only that an application built and started but also that the intended version is serving traffic and critical user paths work. The proposed five-layer approach uses curl to wait for availability, confirm a deployed build ID, and test key routes; a narrowly tagged Playwright subset on the TestMu AI grid to detect rendering and interaction failures; and Kane CLI to validate a plain-English user-flow objective. Its central operational rule distinguishes exit code 0 for promotion, 1 for confirmed build defects that should trigger rollback, and 2 for environmental, configuration, rollout, credential, timeout, or zero-test-selection issues that should be retried rather than blamed on the release. The guide emphasizes safeguards such as polling build IDs instead of relying on HTTP 200 responses, anchoring Playwright tag expressions, checking that tests were selected before execution, separating grid failures from test failures, and keeping production checks read-only. It also provides a CI/CD pattern that retries environmental failures, rolls back only on defects, pins build IDs to commit SHAs, and fails closed on unexpected outcomes. For teams preferring no-code checks, Kane CLI can run individual natural-language objectives or tagged markdown smoke suites, collect evidence on failures, and use equivalent exit-code logic to gate deployments.

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