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by tdumitrescu 3425 days ago
What I dream of implementing at work (once our infrastructure is more fully containerized) is an addition to the CI/CD pipeline where each Pull Request doesn't just kick off tests but also spins up a full staging environment of its own, just waiting for reviewers/designers/PMs a click away. If there were no resource constraints you'd get a separate one for each commit/push so you could compare UX from individual changes.
2 comments
deckar01 3425 days ago
You don't have to wait until you migrate to containerized deploys. Last year my team started deploying our project to folders named after the branch and setup one apache rule to redirect all *.dev. subdomains to the correct folder. We call them virtual development environments, and they worked really well with our existing QA process.
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hobarrera 3424 days ago
What about dependency changes (ie: a new package needs to be installed or updated), or database schema updates?

This also sounds very specific (probably using apache+cgi?). It won't really work for most techs out there.

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deckar01 3423 days ago
The deploy script updates dependencies.

We're not using the apache cgi plugin for python to resolve dependencies, just packages relative the the application root. I think most languages that can import dependencies can import relative dependencies.

Although my specific setup may not work for everyone, I suspect that there is an equally simple solution for most projects. Containerization is definitely a long-term goal, but it is not prerequisite for automated deploys. The things you have to change to get deploys to work on an existing server will also be useful for containerization.

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hiphipjorge 3425 days ago
That's pretty much what we provide at Runnable (Full-stack environments for every branch). Every time you create a branch, we create a new environment for you that anyone on the team can access. Definitely helps to be able to play around with the real app! Every time you push a new commit, we update your environment.

Check it out: https://runnable.com/ or contact me if you have any questions.

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hobarrera 3424 days ago
Any plans on providing GitLab support?
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