Company
Date Published
Author
Mahmoud Abdelwahab
Word count
3325
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The guide explores creating a database for every preview environment using Neon, GitHub Actions, and Vercel, emphasizing the advantages of preview environments over traditional staging setups. It highlights the challenges of staging environments, such as bottlenecks and integration issues, and contrasts them with the benefits of preview environments, which allow isolated, production-like setups for each code change. The document details Neon’s branching feature that enables rapid creation of isolated database copies for preview environments, thereby facilitating parallel development and frequent small releases. It explains how to use GitHub Actions to automate the creation, deployment, and cleanup of these environments, providing a detailed walkthrough of setting up a demo project using Next.js, Prisma, and Neon, and integrating it with Vercel. The guide also covers maintaining database migrations and managing resources programmatically through Neon’s API for a streamlined CI/CD workflow.