Creating software is a team effort, and CloudBees Previews makes it easy for anyone who is collaborating with your development team to generate a preview environment and view your work. CloudBees Previews lets you deploy project artifacts from pull requests. It then creates an isolated preview environment for the artifacts that lets you or your collaborators inspect the changes you introduced. The preview environments are short-lived, ephemeral environments that exist for the life of a given pull request.
| CloudBees Previews creates and manages the preview environment. Another process, for example your CI pipeline, must build a deployable image and push it into a registry that CloudBees Previews can access. |
CloudBees Previews provides the following benefits for the entire development team:
| Audience | Benefits |
|---|---|
Shared services / Platform |
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Developers |
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Collaborators |
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CloudBees Previews supports three different workflows:
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Fully automated - You can configure CloudBees Previews to automatically create and update preview environments.
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ChatOps - You can quickly and easily request a preview environment by adding a comment to a pull request.
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Manually - You can use APIs to manage or customize your preview environments to suit your own specific needs.
Additionally, CloudBees Previews lets you create multiple named environment configurations, called contexts, in a preview.yaml file. You can use these contexts to create specific types of preview environments. For example, you might create one context for updates to the documentation and another context for updates to the application itself. Then, you can request a preview environment for a specific context to view only the updates that are relevant to that context.
| CloudBees Previews only supports Kubernetes deployments. |
To get started, proceed to Installing CloudBees Previews.