Feature branch deployments

Using feature branch deployments to enhance collaboration

I’m currently working with a client building a front-end for a product. Standard landing page and subscription enrollment stuff. The client has a great devops team and one of things that they set me up with was feature branch deployments as part of continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) process.

We’re using GitHub Actions to automate CI/CD and when we open a feature branch and push changes to that feature branch on the remote origin server, the GitHub Action job will eventually deploy the front-end as a uniquely named Kubernetes cluster on our cloud provider. Everything’s automated. With this in hand, I can push changes to the feature branch on the remote server, wait a little bit for the deployment to happen and then engage with others on the project for their input.

Having these deployments available is invaluable. You the developer can solicit almost immediate feedback to your changes. Let others try new features well before getting to the PR. And once in the PR review process, you have the features live in a sequestered environment to ensure functionality merges well with the rest of the application.