When I moved from sending pull requests to open-source projects on GitHub to starting projects of my own and having different people send in their own pull requests with implementations and different ideas, I had a new-found level of respect for open-source maintainers.
Today we have countless open-source projects - from those powering a lot of the global technology infrastructure that we all build on today, to simple plugins that make it much easier to do certain things.
Each of these projects has maintainers that ensure their stability and integrity. As people are encouraged to contribute, it’s become more important than ever to ensure that these new contributions are properly tested, as easily as possible.
What do maintainers currently do?
Typically, maintainers use automated tests as the first line of defense to ensure that the pull request doesn’t break anything. However, to review it further, they are required to follow a rather tedious approach that often requires them to:
- Check out of their current working branch
- Switch to the new branch and update dependencies when needed
- Review the changes and provide feedback where necessary before deciding whether or not to merge
- And then go back to their own work.
This is where CodeSandbox comes in to make this much simpler and faster.
Using the CodeSandbox GitHub app
As a maintainer of an open source project where I work with other collaborators, the CodeSandbox GitHub app makes reviewing a new pull request as simple as clicking a link in the PR to get a running development and preview - all in the browser.
From a pull request sent in from a contributor
To having a running environment from the pull request in seconds.
How does this work?
As an owner or maintainer, you can import your project into CodeSandbox. After it finishes importing, you will be prompted to install the CodeSandbox GitHub app.
Once that is done, for every pull request sent to your project, a CodeSandbox bot adds a link to a running environment and preview to test out and review that pull request.
This means you can even review a pull request from any device without worrying about the development environment. Amazing, right?
To learn more about the CodeSandbox GitHub app and how it can improve your experience as a maintainer, check out the documentation.
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