Feature Request: Deploy Previews

One of my favorite features of services like Netlify and Vercel are that they comment a link to preview the application. I would love to see a similar thing with Fly. I know there is graphql support to automatically spawn new apps but I would like something more complex than that:

  1. Automatically generate a URL like app-name-xyz.fly.dev
  2. All deploys are still under the same project so they are easy to find, sort through delete
  3. Deploys should delete after the PR is merged (or scale down to 0 and boot up if a request is made)
  4. The most important one for me: Be able to define services. So for example, in the toml I could specify that I need a DB as well and it would create a db service along with the app deployment.

Render.com and Heroku have similar things to this but I love the experience of fly and would love to see this come to fruition if possible.

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We’ve talked about this a little bit. I think when we end up doing it, we’ll start with preview apps that use the same secrets (and thus, databases, backend services, etc). Building preview environments with database forks is complicated, and those should probably be a little more permanent.

I don’t think the database should be forked, instead a fresh one should be created (and seeded with a custom script). I also don’t think sharing the secrets with the prod environment is a good idea either because its likely that the pr contains migrations or other breaking changes

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