Lifecycle

Build ephemeral environments from pull requests.

What is lifecycle?
lifecycle is a tool that transforms pull requests into ephemeral development environments that seamlessly connect to required dependencies while remaining isolated from unrelated changes.

Get started here

Lifecycle in action

Watch it on youtube

ephemeral-environments-with-lifecycle.mp4

Use Cases:

• Development:
  Isolated environments for feature branches to develop, without interference from others' work.

• Testing:
  Fully connected and function environments for manual and automated testing.

• Design Review:
  Live environments for product managers and designers to interact with new features.

• External Sandboxes:
  Isolated sandboxes for partners and vendors that share only what’s necessary, avoiding full staging access.

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Development

Prerequisites

Install the following tools using Homebrew:

brew install tilt kind kubectx kubectl
brew install --cask docker

Configuration

• Ngrok: The project uses ngrok to create a public URL for your local instance. You will need to:

  • Sign up for an ngrok account to get an authtoken.
  • Set the following environment variables. You can add them to your shell profile (e.g., ~/.zshrc or ~/.bash_profile).

  export NGROK_AUTHTOKEN="<your_ngrok_authtoken>"export NGROK_LIFECYCLE_DOMAIN="<your_ngrok_domain>"# your ngrok domain. needs paid plan to get a static domain

• AWS Credentials: (Optional, if using AWS ECR) Ensure your AWS credentials are set up in ~/.aws/credentials. The Tilt environment needs this to create a Kubernetes secret for the application.

Running Locally

• Create a local Kubernetes cluster using kind:

  kind create cluster --config sysops/tilt/kind-config.yaml --name lfc

Important

We need to use a custom kind config file to allow insecure registries setup for local development. The local kind config also publishes ports 80 and 443 from the control-plane node back to 127.0.0.1 so host-based ingress works without kubectl port-forward. If you already have an older lfc cluster, recreate it so the new port mappings and fresh seeded domain defaults are applied.

• Switch your Kubernetes context to the newly created cluster:

  kx kind-lfc

• Setup local env secrets at helm/environments/local/secrets.yaml:

  secrets:
  databaseUrl: postgresql://lifecycle:lifecycle@local-postgres:5432/lifecycleredisUrl: redis://redis-master:6379githubPrivateKey: "<private_key_without_new_lines>"githubClientSecret: "<client_secret>"githubWebhookSecret: "<webhook_secret>"githubAppId: "<app_id>"githubClientId: "<client_id>"githubInstallationId: "<installation_id>"encryptionKey: "<64-char hex string, e.g. output of openssl rand -hex 32>"

Note

You can create the GitHub app with the app creation setup flow and then copy the secrets created for local development.

• Start the development environment using tilt:

  tilt up

• Access deployed HTTP services directly from the host using the generated ingress host:

  http://<deploy-uuid>.127.0.0.1.nip.io
  

Note

nip.io resolves names like foo.127.0.0.1.nip.io to 127.0.0.1, so local lifecycle deploys can use host-based ingress without editing /etc/hosts.