Next-generation Deploy Previews, plus Netlify acquires FeaturePeek (YC S19)

A year or so ago I was working on a similar product as FeaturePeek - a platform agnostic deploy preview and collaboration tool. I decided not enough people would want that outside of their hosting platform and shelved it.<p>Clearly I was wrong and clearly why you should talk to more potential customers before you make decisions. Congrats to Netlify and FeaturePeek.

GitLab has a similar feature: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;ci&#x2F;review_apps&#x2F;#visual-reviews" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;ci&#x2F;review_apps&#x2F;#visual-reviews</a><p>It does require a bit more work to set up (which is unfortunate, since they already use the URL could they use that to map back to the PR?) but seems basically the same if not quite as polished.

<i>Collaborative Deploy Previews are fully enabled on every Netlify account today! Anyone with a Netlify account can use the reviewer tool.</i><p>This is why I love Netlify.<p>They put together an incredibly powerful tool, and then released it to ALL of their customers. No, not a &quot;Hey, we created this really cool tool! And for only an extra $3.99&#x2F;mo you can utilize it!&quot; I have several accounts, both free and paid and all of them have the Deploy Preview feature available.<p>There&#x27;s so many things Netlify could&#x27;ve monetized and they haven&#x27;t. They truly are a customer centric company - which is rare these days.

Eric here from FeaturePeek, we are thrilled to be part of Netlify!

This is awesome! I love that everyone can now give feedback. Developers, designers, people who write copy, etc.<p>And that the feedback is piped into a single source of truth: GitHub (of course, if you use GitHub). It&#x27;s so easy to loose track of these things when they&#x27;re not near the code.

&gt; About five years ago, Netlify pioneered the concept of Deploy Previews.<p>Doesn’t Heroku’s “Review Apps” predates this?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.heroku.com&#x2F;heroku_review_apps_beta" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.heroku.com&#x2F;heroku_review_apps_beta</a><p>(funnily enough, it’s been exactly 6 years ago today based on the beta’s blog post above)

This replaces a multi-step manual process that we&#x27;ve been doing in our team. Well done!

I&#x27;m still optimistic for Python Netlify functions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;answers.netlify.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;python-lambda-functions&#x2F;3423&#x2F;15" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;answers.netlify.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;python-lambda-functions&#x2F;3423&#x2F;1...</a><p>If they were JavaSript only I wouldn&#x27;t hold much hope, but they&#x27;ve been both JavaScript and Go for ages now - and I would expect Python to have a much larger user-base than Go for this.

If anyone is interested in a (semi!) working version of feature previews that is open source, I threw together <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;Rodeoclash&#x2F;StageHand" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;Rodeoclash&#x2F;StageHand</a><p>It takes a branch in GitHub and use a config file to bootstrap the application inside a K8&#x27;s cluster using a &quot;docker in docker&quot; model. If you could describe your infrastructure as a docker-compose.yml then you can launch it as a preview.<p>I&#x27;m not really a marketing person so it never went any further than a proof of concept. However, if someone is interested in working with it then I&#x27;m happy to support getting it running.

I can think of 101 ways this can help large teams become more productive

We have a deploy preview system at work and it is so valuable. I see less value in the collaboration tools built on top of these previews, but it’s cool nonetheless.

For preview URLs how are y&#x27;all handling SSO? No SSO provider supports wildcard redirect URIs. Looking for ideas...

This looks great and all but the new drawer icon covers up a key button on our app.. ironically the person who noticed took a regular screenshot and shared it in slack