About Heroku Review Apps

Heroku Review Apps is a feature that Heroku offers its users to spin up a temporary test app for every opened pull request (PR). According to Heroku’s documentation, each review app is a disposable Heroku app environment that allows developers and their teams to automatically build and test any pull request at a temporary, shareable URL. When the pull request is closed or merged, the Review app is deleted.

Recent Concerns About Heroku Review Apps

Recently, Heroku users reported receiving a “Heroku security notification” regarding a security breach that seemingly affected the database that stores pipeline-level config variables for Review Apps. Users were reporting that the Heroku GitHub integrations were temporarily disabled, blocking them from using the Review app functionality and leaving them to look for alternatives.

Why Livecycle is an Ideal Alternative to Heroku Review Apps

The recent events and the interest from users in finding alternatives has led users to consider Livecycle as an ephemeral environment solution that streamlines the subsequent review workflows and cross-unit collaboration with other stakeholders. Users are finding Livecycle increasingly valuable in teams and for managing their open source repositories.

To summarize why Livecycle is an ideal alternative to Heroku Review Apps, we should emphasize a few key points:

1. Easy setup and robust workload compatibility - Livecycle provides ready-to-deploy templates based on your Docker files that allow users to get started with the platform regardless of the back-end provider and front-end frameworks that are in use. You can expect the first ephemeral environment to be spin up within minutes. And they will be generated automatically per-PR as you go. Migrating from Heroku or your current pipeline is a quick and easy part of the process.

2. Built-in collaboration and annotation tools - Livecycle offers much more than just a link to a stand-alone preview environment per-PR. Each Livecycle environment is a live, collaborative “playground” that includes a rich layer of built-in collaboration and annotation tools. These collaboration tools allow all collaborators to join the PR review and leave their comments visually, on top of the product UI. These comments are maintained in Livecycle and also synced back to Git as review comments so that developers can see the issues faster, understand them better and address them sooner than ever before. Livecycle enables a truly frictionless workflow - not just visibility of the front end. Since all stakeholders run their reviews concurrently, asynchronously and contextually on top of the same PR, there is an up to 10x increase in development velocity and build quality.

3. Free for open source - Livecycle is free-forever for open source projects who want to install and benefit from Livecycle’s inclusive collaboration. We are privileged to be assisting opens source projects to streamline their workflow between maintainers, contributors and users. Using Livecycle directly impacts the efficiency of maintaining projects, the contributor experience and the number of users who try to fork and adopt the product.

So try Livecycle for free today, and experience the convenience of automated ephemeral environments and the magic of built-in, async contextual collaboration.