I’d really like to take this feature/change for a spin, but it’s so much work spinning up an environment just for that! 😩 - Sincerely, Everyone.
Haven’t we all been there before? Well, no more! By sprinkling a little pixie dust onto your CI, we can make it possible to spin up an entire preview environment on-the-go, to test out all your changes 🙂
The quick version?
- Comment
/previewon a Pull Request to start an ephemeral Preview Environment - This will stay up for 30 minutes by default, but you can change that in the workflow file
We use the expose-tunnel action to easily set up a tunnel into the CI job. It creates a tunnel using bore.pub, which supports setting up your own self-hosted server.
Check out the examples here:
The following diagram is an overview of the flow the CI job:
Comment posted on Pull Request
↓
+----------------------------+
| Detect Trigger Comment |
| React with 👀 if it is |
+----------------------------+
↓
+----------------------------+
| Checkout PR Code |
+----------------------------+
↓
+----------------------------+
| Setup Project Dependencies |
+----------------------------+
↓
+----------------------------+
| Start Development Server |
| in background |
+----------------------------+
↓
+----------------------------+
| Setup Tunnel into CI Job |
+----------------------------+
↓
+----------------------------+
| Post Tunnel URL as Comment |
| on the Pull Request |
+----------------------------+
↓
+----------------------------+
| Keep CI/Server alive for |
| 30 minutes |
+----------------------------+