What is Shipyard?

Shipyard allows you to run ephemeral copies of your app, all based on your project's docker-compose file. Enabling Shipyard on your GitHub application allows you to access both manually and automatically-generated ephemeral environments.

General usage

Adding your app's main branch to Shipyard will give you 3 things:

1. Your project's main dev environment. We provide you with your own temporary domain, but you also have the option of using your own dev.coolcompany.com domain. Anytime you push to main, Shipyard will automatically build and update this environment with your latest code.

2. Automatic PR environments. We spin up a copy of your app for every pull request you make. Shipyard can drop the environment link in your PR. The environment is automatically shut down when the PR is closed/merged/deleted to keep your workspace tidy.

3. Demo environments. We give you the option to manually spin up as many copies of your app as you want. Version, config, and data for demo environments will be left alone, unlike the two environment types above, which auto-update.

Other cool features

1. Access your image build logs and running container logs (through the Developer Dashboard).
2. Grant team members access to each individual environment securely by email address (by OAuth).
3. Store sensitive environment variables directly in Shipyard (so you don't have to commit them to your app's repo).
4. Terminal access into your containers (through the Developer Dashboard).
5. Use images from your private registry.
6. Configure your environments to mix-and-match image versions from different branches and repos (i.e. test a frontend feature branch with a backend feature branch).