Introducing Pull request Previews — to keep your developer teams in the flow
May 13, 2025
Do you have just one staging & test environment in your team? Or do you see your work colliding with others in the same test environment? Are you waiting for your turn to test your changes?
Keeping developers in the flow is crucial for business velocity. With pull request previews, teams can iterate and test changes faster than ever — enabling daily feature releases that boosts both customer satisfaction and developer happiness. This momentum fuels even more motivation and faster delivery. It’s a virtuous cycle—and you want to be in it.
We have released Pull request previews today to unblock your team to deploy, test each pull request in an isolated setup.
Introducing Preview services:
In your current app environment, say you have two services
backend
frontend
Say backend service is pointed at code in main branch of backend repo. If anyone in your team raises a pull request in github, targeting to merge fix-issue30 branch into main branch, LocalOps pulls and builds the latest commit from the pull request branch fix-issue30 , creates a new preview service with the latest commit and run it in its own SSL powered URL.
Automatic deployments
Every time, new commits are pushed to the PR, they are pulled and deployed by LocalOps on the same preview service. We will also post a comment on the Pull request about the unique preview URL and show latest commit & deployment status.
Ephemeral
All pull request previews are ephemeral / temporary. When you close the same PR, the service will be queued for deletion and the URL will go away in few minutes.
You can of-course re-open the PR if you want the changes again. LocalOps will create a new preview service with a new URL again for the re-opened PR.
All on your cloud
Pull request previews will run in the same app environment that is provisioned earlier in your cloud by Localops, right next to the service that is pointing at base branch / target branch main runs.
We pre-configure the preview URL's domain and SSL certificate so you don’t have to configure any of that. You just have to signup, connect your cloud account, create a new environment to start utilizing pull request previews.
Sign up now to get started. There is a free plan for you to spin up a new app environment.
Turn on Pull request previews
In a service that is already running with a specific branch, you will have to explicitly turn on pull request previews to control which pull requests can create preview URLs. This is so that you don’t use additional cloud resources for pull requests that don’t need testing.
In above setting of a pre-existing service, pull request previews are created whenever there is a PR raised towards main branch in localopsco/sample-service repo.
Secrets and data
Your pull request preview services are created based on the "Enable previews" setting of a parent service running main branch or any other branch. Secrets that are marked as "usable in preview environments" are copied over from the parent service to the new preview service. You can modify these secrets anytime in preview service settings to fine tune based on your environment.
Be in the flow
Your team can now raise pull requests, test functionality in isolation and release changes to production without stepping on each other. They can be in their own flow of building, testing and releasing features.
More questions?
If you have more questions on this feature, email me at [email protected] or book 20mins for a free tour of the platform - https://go.localops.co/tour.