Show HN: PullPreview – Deploy previews for any application, on your servers

It may be simple for you to do, but you just described having to provision a server, manually checkout your code using SSH agent forwarding or HTTPS auth, setup your environment variables, and then launch the app. And manually repeat the last steps as many times as you push to your branch.

At this point you’re the only one to know about your preview server, and you need to not forget to destroy it when you’re done.

PullPreview handles all of the synchronisation mechanism, as well as providing pretty URLs, automated SSH access to any GutHub users, source IP filtering, port firewalling, HTTPS support etc.

Plus the whole integration into GitHub so that you don’t need to retrieve the preview URL by yourself, and you get notified if anything goes wrong during the deploy, with full logs available.

That’s the gap we’re trying to fill :)

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 :)

First off, congrats on launching! I've personally been working on something very similar for the last bit, and actually plan on launching very soon.

As other commenters have mentioned, this is a system which seems all-to-common to have built in house, and I think you've highlighted issues with that: it may be simple to get something basic working, but without a larger investment, it ends up being unstable and unmaintained.

It's been great seeing all of the similar solutions being launched over the past month, and the slight different ways that different players (you, Okteto, LayerCI, Release, FeaturePeek, etc) are approaching this issue. I see that what you have done is specifically focused on Docker, and purposely avoided Kubernetes. I think that gives you a niche space, along with Dockup (https://getdockup.com/), who I believe are taking the same approach.

I appreciate your focus on security and privacy, specifically around "can never seen your code", but I'm curious about this choice. Did you find that this was actually a concern that customers had? CI/CD platforms, which are kind of a neighbor of Continous Product Review tools (this is how I've been referring to this class of product internally), and have an implicit trust. I have not received much push-back about automated code access, and when that has been a concern, I've found that those individuals preferred to how everything in-house anyways (Gitlab, or Github Enterprise).

Do you have any sort of cost-control structure in place? Being a Github Action, I see this more as a library than a managed service, which also means you have less control/ability to monitor your users ephemeral environments, and I would hate to see the shutdown behaviour break, and suddenly ephemeral environments never go away and your user is left with an obnoxiously large AWS bill.

Overall, I love what you're doing to approach this space in a new way. If you'd like to chat about the space, my email is in my profile (I literally just added it, so hopefully it's visible :fingers-crossed:)

I would love to see a version of this for GCP an other cloud platforms (DO, Heroku, especially), would you be open to a collaboration there assuming I can code in your lingua franca?

FeaturePeek cofounder here! Glad to see others in this space :-) Yes, our use case is mostly geared towards frontends devs getting design and product feedback from their team.

Right now we only spin up frontends (both pure static and Docker-based architectures, which you can of course point to backend services you host), and run in the public cloud (so not tied to your existing infra). By default, environments are private, so only the people you whitelist can access them.

On top of that, we overlay tools that let you comment w/ screenshots and screen recordings, and file tickets on third-party integrations.

We also have other neat usability wins, like each repo getting its own subdomain (rather than each pull request) so that you don't have to re-login to your app for each environment that spins up.