Automating Preview Deployments for PRs

[abhayymishraa]

I’d like to discuss on setting up an automated preview deployment workflow whenever a pull request (PR) is raised. Instead of manually sharing changes, this would allow contributors and reviewers to instantly see a live preview and verify that the build is successful.

How It Would Work:

• When a PR is created, a workflow will trigger the deployment process.
• The backend (Django) will be deployed first using Zappa, which is serverless and cost-efficient for temporary environments.
• Once the backend is deployed, its URL will be passed to the frontend.
• The frontend will then be deployed to Cloudflare Pages, ensuring a smooth and quick preview setup.
• When the PR is merged, both preview environments will automatically be removed.

Challenges:

• Deploying the frontend preview is straightforward, but dynamically pointing it to a preview backend is trickier since we use Django.
• Zappa is a good solution for temporary backend environments, but it introduces a new stack into our workflow.
• While this setup simplifies frontend reviews, backend previews might still need additional configuration.

Alternative Approach

Since previews are primarily useful for the frontend, another option could be to deploy only the frontend and have it target a shared OWASP backend instead of spinning up a temporary backend for each PR.

Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts! Are there any concerns, improvements, or alternative approaches we should consider? Let’s collaborate on making the review process smoother.