Show HN: PullPreview – Deploy previews for any application, on your servers
Hi HN, this is our submission for PullPreview, a way to spin preview environments for any application directly from GitHub to cheap AWS Lightsail servers. No intermediary service involved.<p>## Context<p>PullPreview’s main use case is for making it easier to review code in branches or pull requests, because reviews with live code are always better than code-only reviews. This means better and faster feedback from reviewers (be it clients or teammates), so that everyone can iterate faster on the feature being developed.<p>However in most organizations, there is only a handful of staging servers available to the developers, which are hard to keep in sync, maintain, and with complicated processes to make sure you don’t step on someone else’s code.<p>PullPreview solves this with ephemeral environments for any pull request or branches, just by adding a label from the GitHub UI. URLs for the deployed environments are displayed right into the GitHub UI, thanks to the integration with the Deployments API.<p>## How it works (spoiler: no kubernetes)<p>Contrary to many other solutions, PullPreview _never sees your code_, because it runs as a GitHub Action and does all the work within the GitHub Action runner. The Action automatically provisions a server in _your_ AWS account (a cheap Lightsail instance), and then boots your application using the Docker Compose file(s) that you specify. The server is automatically destroyed when the PR is merged, closed, or the label removed.<p>Some of the features include unlimited parallel environments, support for SSH access, source IP filtering, port filtering, seed data support, data persistence across deploys, all managed from the GitHub UI.<p>All of this is packaged as an Open-Source GitHub Action that can be tried right now. You can run it for free for 30 days, and after that we have two license tiers at 120€&#x2F;year and 300€&#x2F;year. We believe it is pretty cheap compared to rolling and maintaining your own solution in-house. It is also free for non-profits.<p>## Next steps<p>We’re looking for feedback on the idea, what could be missing, and the pricing. We are also discovering many more use cases while dogfooding our own idea. For instance, we are currently running a few services in production, continuously deployed thanks to PullPreview (e.g. pullpreview.com itself).