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Preview Environments

Preview environments are ephemeral, fully functional deployments of your application generated automatically for every Pull Request. They allow your team to QA changes, run end-to-end tests, and share progress with stakeholders before merging to production.

How Previews Work

When you connect a GitHub repository to a LaunchVerse project:

  1. You open a Pull Request against your production branch (e.g., main).
  2. LaunchVerse intercepts the GitHub webhook and triggers a new build via the Forge Builder.
  3. The build is isolated in a sandboxed container.
  4. LaunchVerse generates a unique, secure URL (e.g., pr-42-yourproject.launchverse.app) and posts a comment back to your GitHub PR with the link.
  5. Every subsequent commit to that PR updates the preview environment automatically.

Resource Management

To prevent preview environments from eating into your compute quota, LaunchVerse utilizes two powerful features:

    1. Scale-to-Zero: Preview environments automatically scale down to zero when idle. They only consume resources when a developer or stakeholder actively accesses the preview URL.
    2. Auto-Sweep: When a Pull Request is merged or closed, LaunchVerse instantly intercepts the GitHub webhook and sweeps (destroys) the ephemeral preview environment, keeping your infrastructure clean.

Database Branching (Preview Databases)

If your application relies on a database, pointing a Preview Environment to your Production database is dangerous. LaunchVerse supports database branching for supported engines (like Postgres).

When a Preview is spun up, you can configure LaunchVerse to automatically snapshot your production schema (and optionally, anonymized seed data) into an ephemeral Preview Database. The preview environment variables are dynamically updated to point to this ephemeral database.

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