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Overview

LocalOps can automatically spin up ephemeral/temporary services to run your code, for every pull request your team creates in GitHub. Each copy can be a full-stack spin-off when combined with ops.json configuration. Read on to learn more.

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How it works

Create a new environment if one doesn’t exist. This will create a VPC and EKS cluster to host the ephemeral services.
  1. Create a new service (say, backend) in the environment based on a specific Github repo and branch name (say, main branch)
  2. Turn on “Enable pull request previews” in the service.
  3. Create and save the service
From now onwards, LocalOps listens for all pull requests created in the above repository and against the branch configured in the service. When a new pull request is raised in the same GitHub repo, from source branch f-feature-new targeting the main branch,
  1. a new copy of the service backend is created in the same environment, referred to as “Preview service”, with the latest commit of the PR branch as source. This new PR-based service is its own service with secrets, and other configuration copied from the main service.
  2. a new comment is posted on the PR page in GitHub containing the public URL for the service and a link to see deployment logs.
When the PR is closed or merged, the preview service is automatically deleted from your environment.
For preview environments to work, the github user who is commiting on the pull request branch must be added to your LocalOps account as a user. And they must have linked their Github profile with LocalOps from inside Profile settings: https://console.localops.co/profile

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Preview services

For each PR that is open, there will be a new Preview service created as per the workflow mentioned above. This is its own service with its own unique name. You can see it in “Services” section of the environment, right next to the main service running based on the target branch.

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Automatic deployments

When new commits are pushed to the PR branch, build & deployment steps are triggered automatically on the specific “Preview service” using the latest commit.

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LOPS_PREVIEW=true

For all preview services, LocalOps passes LOPS_PREVIEW=true as environment variable so that your code can perform any custom logic suitable for this isolated preview setup.

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Handling dependencies

Say your PR is raised from f-feature-new branch to get merged into main branch.

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Inter service dependencies

Say your original service depended on another service in the same environment called “ML API”. This dependency may be configured as secrets in the original service Secrets section as “ML_API_HOST” and “ML_API_SECRET”. You can update these keys in Secrets section to turn on “Use in preview environments” flag. It means that when a new “preview service” is created for on PR, the secrets & their are values from the original service are copied over to the “preview service” as well. When the preview service comes up for any given PR, it comes up with same secrets “ML_API_HOST” and “ML_API_SECRET_KEY” set to point at the same “ML API” service. And it retains the dependency as main service. Service deps No limits: Since preview service is its own service with its own secrets, if you want it to point at a different ML_API service, you can visit the service > secrets section in LocalOps console, to edit the secret. There is no limit on the dependencies you can configure for the ephemeral preview services.

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Isolated cloud resources

Any service can define its cloud resource dependencies (like S3 bucket, SNS topic, RDS instance etc.,) in its ops.json file. When a new service is created, all those resources defined in ops.json are provisioned exclusively for the service, automatically. And when the service is deleted, those resources are deleted automatically. When a new preview service is created specifically for the PR, the same workflow applies. Existing existing ops.json configuration in the PR branch is read and new cloud resources are provisioned exclusively for the PR branch and the preview service. The preview service is its own isolated service running the PR branch’s code. preview_only: You can define preview_only in the dependencies if needed to spin up certain resources only in preview services. Or spin up same resources with different configuration, just for preview services. Say you want to provision a 10GB RDS instance for pull request previews but a 100GB RDS instance during other times. In addition, resources in ops.json are configured differently in other ways by LocalOps, for preview services for speed of boot-up and cost savings. Backups, encryption and monitoring are turned off in cloud resources created for preview services. Following services can be defined in ops.json (as on June 9 2025):
  1. S3 buckets
  2. SNS topics
  3. SQS queues
  4. RDS Database instances - MySQL or Postgres
  5. Elastic cache clusters - Memcache or Redis

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Isolated cron service

ops.json is processed exclusively for any given preview service. So any cron configuration defined within the ops.json is provisioned exclusively for the preview service. Checkout cron docs here for more info.

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Third party apps

You may use 3rd party services like Slack, Google Apps, and others for Integration, Authentication, Notifications etc., You may define these dependencies in “Secrets” section of the main service. And when the preview services comes up for a given PR, secrets with “Use in previews” setting turned on, are copied over. When this sharing isn’t ideal in your case, you may follow one of the below strategies on a case by case basis.
  1. Wait till the preview service comes up first time for a given PR. After it comes up, you may manually create a new instance of your 3rd party app for the purpose of testing it in the preview service. And add its credentials in the preview service’s secret section.
  2. If the 3rd party allows you to do #1 via their API, you can do so in your application/service boot-up logic, when the preview service comes up. LocalOps passes in LOPS_PREVIEW=true in all preview services as in-built environment variable.
  3. When there is a possibility to share the same 3rd party integration app/id and create a new redirect URL in the app’s settings via their API, you can do the same, as a simplified case of #2 above. LocalOps passes LOPS_SVC_HOST environment variable with the latest public url of the service.
Talk to us at help@localops.co and we can come up with alternate strategies to make 3rd party apps work in preview services.