Hi HN,

I'm building Autodock, a service that spins up preview environments for more or less any webapp.

When you make a PR to a repo with the Autodock GH App installed and the GH Action configured, you'll get links to your deployed app in a comment. Here's an example of what one looks like: https://github.com/mikesol/inboxpilot/pull/1#issuecomment-36...

The differences between Autodock and, say, Vercel preview environments are:

- It works with complex monorepos, including frontends, backends, databases, queues and various microservices. - Once your dev box is up and running, you can use MCP to interact with it over SSH. While my goal with Autodock is to achieve one-shot deployments, this is useful to fix any issues that may arise. - I built Autodock with observability as a first-class citizen, so everything in the box is wired to go through Loki. - Each box has inbound email, and there's a browser debugging functionality too that corrolates backend and frontend logs.

I've tested it on Lago, Nango, and Strapi, and I'm making my way down awesome-oss-alternatives over the next few weeks.

I built Autodock because this year I tried out overemployment for a few months and quickly realized that one of the biggest time sinks was deploying and maintaining staging environments. It started as a way for me to quickly launch and stop remote servers, and I grew its feature set as different needs emerged from different projects. By the end of my time being overemployed, I was using it as an internal tool for every job. I thought it'd be fun to build it as a business and see if it could go head-to-head with bigger players in the space like Codespaces or GitPod by leaning into this novel approach.

Installation instructions are on https://autodock.io/preview-setup. There's a no-credit-card-required free tier that you can use to try it out. I'm curious to hear how it fares on folks's GitHub repos!

Show HN: Zero-config staging environments for GitHub repos