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Continuous Deployment

How to Set Up Preview Environments for Pull Requests

Have you ever been frustrated at long merge queues? Did you ever wish there was a better and faster way to get feedback on your code changes and approval from your team members?

You may have also been on the other side of the table, reviewing pull requests and wishing there was a better way to actually test the revisions before approving it; giving you a sense of what it would feel and look like if it were to merge.

Netlify and other frontend hosting services have spoiled us with the ability to spin up a live instance of the application for each pull request for static files. But what about backend applications? How can we achieve the same and deploy our backend for every new proposed change in pull requests?

In this blog post, we will explore how to set up preview environments for each pull request using GitHub Actions and Kubernetes. This guide includes spinning up the application as a live instance with an internet accessible URL to preview and verify the changes before they find their way into the main trunk.

Integration Testing with GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a great CI/CD tool to automate the daily operations of your application lifecycle in many ways. It comes with a lot of features out of the box and even the ones that are missing are wholeheartedly provided by the community.

There are many great and brilliant engineers working daily to provide a fantastic experience for the rest of us.

In this blog post, you will learn how to perform your integration testing using GitHub Actions with all its dependencies and services spun up beforehand.

Stick around till the end to find out how.