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Hello, review apps are a hot topic it seems ;) Many companies have come with their own version of the concept, which in our experience doesn’t stand well the t

by crohr 6y ago

Hello, review apps are a hot topic it seems ;) Many companies have come with their own version of the concept, which in our experience doesn’t stand well the test of time (because the person that wrote the glue code left the company or docs are lacking or setup is very complex, etc). Hence PullPreview, so that companies can delegate the burden of maintaining that workflow to us, while retaining full control over their code and servers. Our version is also Open Source (but not free except for non profits) and it doesn’t limit in any way the number of ports you can expose . By default and for ease of use ports 22, 80 and 1000-10000 are allowed in the firewall, but you can reduce that to the bare minimum with just a single config option. See https://github.com/pullpreview/action/wiki/Inputs https://github.com/pullpreview/action/wiki/Inputs For more details.

Rodeoclash 6y ago
Awesome! It's always interesting to see how others solve the curly edge cases too. I struggled with figuring out when to shut down a preview (hence why it deploys in an iFrame, I track presence using websockets and shut the preview down after the user is done) Deploying on Lightsail is good too. I went with K8s and always had the intention of using some kind of VM level isolation, but (kind of) physically separate servers like Lightsail works well too. Why thing I couldn't really figure out, how do you go with large docker images? The bulk of my spin up time is spent pulling the image. I never got around to figuring out how to do a good cache for it.
- crohr 6y ago
  > The bulk of my spin up time is spent pulling the image. I never got around to figuring out how to do a good cache for it. With our approach you keep the same instance for the duration of a PR or branch, so you mostly incur the docker tax On the first deploy. Afterwards it will reuse the local cache. Does that make sense?
  - Rodeoclash 6y ago
    Yep, I suppose at $5 per month or whatever the cost of the instances, that's not actually a bad price. My assumption was to spread the cost of running the previews across a fleet, but like you said, you pay the docker tax :)

by crohr 6y ago

Rodeoclash 6y ago

Awesome! It's always interesting to see how others solve the curly edge cases too. I struggled with figuring out when to shut down a preview (hence why it deploys in an iFrame, I track presence using websockets and shut the preview down after the user is done) Deploying on Lightsail is good too. I went with K8s and always had the intention of using some kind of VM level isolation, but (kind of) physically separate servers like Lightsail works well too. Why thing I couldn't really figure out, how do you go with large docker images? The bulk of my spin up time is spent pulling the image. I never got around to figuring out how to do a good cache for it.

crohr 6y ago
> The bulk of my spin up time is spent pulling the image. I never got around to figuring out how to do a good cache for it. With our approach you keep the same instance for the duration of a PR or branch, so you mostly incur the docker tax On the first deploy. Afterwards it will reuse the local cache. Does that make sense?
- Rodeoclash 6y ago
  Yep, I suppose at $5 per month or whatever the cost of the instances, that's not actually a bad price. My assumption was to spread the cost of running the previews across a fleet, but like you said, you pay the docker tax :)