Creating databases for Preview Deployments

[jamescrosswell]

The app I'm deploying has some databases so I'm wondering how to do this. Ideally I could:

• Run a script before a preview deployment that would create a database using the uniqueid for the preview
• Also automatically use the uniqueid in the db name that is set in the env vars
• Run a script before/when the preview deployment gets deleted, so I could remove the temporary databases that were created for the preview deployment

Are any of those things possible at the moment? If not, how are other folks doing this, as I imagine it's a pretty common problem to solve?

The only thing I can think is that I could potentially use hooks from my CI/CD (GitHub Actions) to create and delete some temporary databases when PRs get created/closed, based on the PR number or branch name... and then the from Dokploy I'd just need some way to infer the PR or branch that triggered the deployment and be able to use that in the environment variables for the preview deployment (which is where the db settings reside).

EDIT: Another thought is maybe using Docker Compose and just create the DB in a container with no persistent storage... which takes care of cleanup. I think I'll play around with that idea - so have the DB as a separate service in production, but create a 'Preview' app using Compose to test stuff out in PRs/branches.

EDIT 2: Hm... not as easy as I thought. Compose services don't have Preview Deployments like Application services do 😢

• Add "Preview Deployments" on Docker Compose apps #2028

Back to square one then. How are folks doing this?

[kirill-dev-pro]

Probably the only way is to do it with neon branches. Currently looks like no way for this. Let's see, next version should have pre/after-deploy hook scripts. That could be a solution

[joezappie]

Did you ever figure out a solution to this? I'm looking to use neon previews and dokploy previews together.

Seems like using a Github workflow to create the neon preview database is the way to go as they provide easy actions for this. I don't know how to integrate this into dokploy to get it the neon database URL as it seems like it just only can create the preview environments when it detects a PR was made.

[jamescrosswell]

From memory, I deployed the databases to a new container with no backing storage (so cleanup is automatic/unecessary). For preview deployments, that works for me.