Flow Preview Environments
Easily create a first class PR preview environment experience within Flows
Overview
Preview environments are a powerful software testing pattern in which you create a near clone of a dev environment running a feature branch's code for the duration of a pull request. This has a few great benefits:
- Reduces churn in your dev environment, improving overall stability - a common failure point in large organizations with many in-flight changes
- Makes it easier to test code in isolation - the code only has the changes in your branch
- Reduces dev data corruption issues - if you implement database forking as part of the preview, making it easy to test things like schema migrations
This is extremely easy to implement with Plural for a few reasons:
- GitOps patterns make it easy to redeploy and reconfigure services
- Plural already natively implements the webhook and event system to track PR updates within its server
- Plural already has a secure way of managing SCM credentials, so it can natively implement GitHub/GitLab comment feedback for an ideal DevEx around preview environments
Demo Video
If you want to see it in action, here's a quick YouTube video demo:
How to Implement
Implementing preview environments is quite simple. You only need to register one custom resource, a PreviewEnvironmentTemplate like the one below: