Developers love to automate things. Shave yaks. Automation can save tremendous time, but automating complex processes can also be a big time sink. This is a story in compromise.
The other thing developers love is free software. I love GitHub, Travis, and Heroku because they all provide a very generous free usage tier – let’s have a look at how we can leverage them to automate preview environments (think: preview the result of a new pull request) for Wagtail, a project I frequently contribute to.
A disclaimer – the end result isn’t full automation, it still is a manual process. We shall call this semi-automated preview environments.