Pull Request Environments
Pull request environments are ephemeral, fully-functional cloud environments that greyhound can spin up for every pull request. They give developers a real deployment — with services, databases, and ingress routing — all tied to the lifecycle of a pull request.
What Are They For?
PR environments let you validate changes in a real cloud environment before merging. Instead of relying on local setups or shared staging, each PR gets its own isolated deployment that you can access via a URL, share with teammates, and test against.
Common use cases:
- QA and review — reviewers click a link in the PR comment to see the running app
- Integration testing — verify services work together with real databases and infrastructure
- Demo and stakeholder feedback — share a live URL with PMs or designers before merging
- Parallel development — multiple developers work on separate PRs without stepping on each other's environments
The PR Environment Lifecycle
The environment is tied to your pull request from creation to cleanup:
- Create — add the deploy label to your PR and greyhound builds images, provisions infrastructure, and posts a comment with service URLs
- Explore — access your running services through the links in the PR comment
- Update — push new commits and greyhound automatically rebuilds and redeploys
- Delete — merge, close, or remove the label and greyhound tears everything down
Environments are also subject to a TTL — if a PR environment sits idle beyond the configured time limit, greyhound's reaper cleans it up automatically.