Introducing "Preevy" - Instant preview environments for complex applications

Meet Preevy - Livecycle’s Open Source CLI Tool

We are excited to announce the launch of Preevy - Livecycle’s new Open Source offering. If you’re a Docker Compose user, Preevy can deploy your app to a public, ephemeral environment, (also known as a Preview Environment) for every code change you make.

Preview environments are a non-production version of your app, including all its services, accessible not only to you, but to the rest of your team, including designers, product people and other developers. Preview environments can be used to test, validate and review changes made in a pull request, before merging it. You can read more about Preevy at the official docs site.

How does Preevy work?

Preevy can take any Docker-Compose application definition and perform the following with a single up command:

• Provision and configure a new virtual machine (VM) on your cloud.
• Build and deploy your application on the VM.
• Expose each service of your application to the web with a user-friendly public HTTPS URL without any DNS/Certificate configuration.

These environments can be managed using the Preevy command-line interface (CLI) and can be easily updated or destroyed when necessary. While Preevy can be used for sharing local environments with your team, its primary goal is to implement preview environments for pull requests. Therefore, it's designed to be easily integrated into CI/CD flows.

Why did we build Preevy?

At Livecycle, we believe that preview environments are an integral part of any development flow, in any engineering team.

These non-production, ephemeral environments, created for every Pull Request, can significantly improve PR workflows.

In recent years, preview environments have become increasingly popular, with some PaaS providers even offering deeply integrated preview environments. However, setting up preview environments can be a complex and costly task, which is why many teams have been hesitant to implement them.

Preevy is designed to simplify this task and provide a framework for provisioning and utilizing preview environments to optimize the PR flow.

Links and resources

• Preevy’s GitHub repo (feel free to leave a star :-))
• The Preevy docs site