Investigate increasing developer productivity with pull requests environments

[waveywaves]

I would like to make life easier for existing and new Meilisearch contributors including maintainers by implementing Uffizzi previews.
Disclaimer: I work on Uffizzi
Uffizzi is a Open Source full stack previews engine and is free for Meilisearch. This will provide newcomers with previews of their PRs in the cloud, allowing them iterate faster, without having to first set up a complete development environment themselves.

TODO:

• Intial POC

[curquiza]

Hello @waveywaves
thanks for sharing this with us. I move this from an issue to a discussion since we are more in an investigation phase 😄

Can you tell us more about Uffizzi, I'm not sure to understand the purpose: how could it be helpful for our workflow? How would it be integrated?

[waveywaves]

Hey @curquiza, I understand 😄
Uffizzi is a previews engine which runs on top of Kubernetes.
It will take a docker-compose file with custom x-uffizzi configuration to help create previews on every PR made to the target repository. Every time a contributor opens a pull request to meilisearch, you (or any maintainer) would have to pull the code, build it and test it. With these pull request previews you wouldn't have to pull the code or build it, initially. You can just start testing the code with the preview deployed on the PR. Checkout the Uffizzi Quickstart if you want to try it out !

If I get a "good to go" from your side, I can get started on the PoC right away 🚀

[waveywaves]

@irevoire Thank you for the questions ! Ask away :)

If I understood correctly, you're going to rebuild a docker image for every PR that is created in meilisearch?

Yes that's correct

and run the meilisearch image for a certain amount of time (how long?) in the hope someone is going to connect to it.

This preview will run till the PR is open. The preview will be deleted once the PR is closed.

I'm just wondering, but where does it run, and who's paying for it?

It runs on the Uffizzi platform built on top of Kubernetes, you can check out our github repo https://github.com/UffizziCloud/uffizzi.

Also, what stops us from mining crypto-currency or doing this kind of shady thing instead of using meilisearch, or more generally, how it is secured?

We trust that such a thing won't happen. But in terms of security, we can setup a password protected environment for you where the password would only be known to the meilisearch team. Does that work for you ?

Is everyone clicking on the link going to see a newly deployed image, or is there one image shared for anyone?

Every new PR will have a new deployment. And for the same PR preview link a new console would be opened for the user but it will link to the same PR preview.

Should we enable uffizzi manually for each PR, or is it working automatically?

Uffizzi works automatically.

[curquiza]

If I understood correctly, you're going to rebuild a docker image for every PR that is created in meilisearch?

Yes that's correct

A good question from my team: btw 2 commits in the same PR, does it build from the beginning or does it use the docker cache? If it's a fresh new environment, it's certainly from scratch without any cache

[waveywaves]

Docker cache is enabled on the github actions. The image doesn't rebuild completely only the stuff that needs to be built.

[irevoire]

We trust that such a thing won't happen. But in terms of security, we can setup a password protected environment for you where the password would only be known to the meilisearch team. Does that work for you ?

Personally, I would prefer to keep the preview open to anyone without any password. It just seems a bit off to me that you can give free computer power to anyone without any way to ensure they’re using it as intended 😅

---

I see you’ve made a bunch of tests on meilisearch already, out of curiosity, how long does it take to create the env’ after the opening of the PR?

[waveywaves]

Personally, I would prefer to keep the preview open to anyone without any password. It just seems a bit off to me that you can give free computer power to anyone without any way to ensure they’re using it as intended 😅

The compute will be around only for a while and is capped. We trust meilisearch maintainers who wanna use uffizzi to say the least :)

I see you’ve made a bunch of tests on meilisearch already, out of curiosity, how long does it take to create the env’ after the opening of the PR?

Around 15-20 minutes for the first commit and lesser time for the next ones depending on the changes. GitHub cache is enabled for the builds.

[curquiza]

A question from the pricing plan, I see "Maximum of 2 concurrent Preview Environments". Does it mean we could have only two PR previews at the same time?

[waveywaves]

@curquiza No, Meilisearch will be on the open source tier so you don't have to worry about this. Meilisearch can have how many ever concurrent previews it wants.