Exclusive preview: Buddy Sandboxes

The Problem

Hosting development & staging versions of projects involves a pain of managing dozens locations. In-house previews, QA stages, client presentations – they all take much more hassle than they should. There are:

• servers and vhosts that need to be set up
• passwords that need to be remembered.
• deployments that must be defined.

At the end, you have to remember what's still in use and where, what’s alive and what's a zombie—and you end up in a little sysadmin’s nightmare.

The Solution: Buddy Sandboxes

This month we're going to launch the beta of Buddy Sandboxes: the complete remedy to your problems with development hosting.

You won't need a server anymore. Instead, every branch will receive an isolated environment (the sandbox). All you need to do is write code, push it to the repo, and buddy will automatically build and serve your app from the sandbox. In the end you receive a URL with your application already running. Isn't that awesome?

Sandboxes Overiew

The easiest way to understand the idea of sandboxes is to approach them as any server with a root access. Here you can see a list of sandboxes that mirror branches in your project. The sandboxes are generated automatically as soon as you create a new branch in your repository:

List of sandboxes

Every sandbox is a Linux container with the pre-installed components required to run your project. Clicking a sandbox brings up its control panel where you can define the components and the building process of your application. Everyone who's ever worked with builds in Buddy will immediately feel at home.

You can use your terminal to iterate with the sandbox just like with any other server, as well as browse and edit files directly in the GUI.

Sandbox details

Beta starts next week

If you'd like to give a test ride to Sandboxes before everyone else, just let us know at sandboxes@buddy.works

Remember: Buddy is 100% customer-driven. Thank you for thousands of emails and Intercom conversations. It is you – the developers – who shape the software and decide how it should be developed. If you have any suggestions about new features and improvements make sure to share it with us – we read and discuss all of them!

And in case you missed it, here's the video of Sandboxes in action that we released last week: