How To Create PR Review Apps With Render

Code reviews are essential before merging a pull request. It’s a common practice to have another engineer look through the code changes, and it’s even better if you have a continuous integration (CI) pipeline configured that runs linters and unit tests to catch issues automatically.

For UI changes, it’s also a great idea to visually inspect the changes in the app. Doing so may require the reviewer to check out the branch and run the app on their machine. Depending on the complexity of your app’s architecture, running the app locally may be trivial to do with a single command, or it may require several steps and a fair amount of time.

Pull request review apps help facilitate this process by deploying a version of the app with the pull request’s changes applied in a preview environment. Now the reviewer doesn’t need to pull down the code themselves!