We're excited to announce our rebrand from LayerCI to webapp.io. Learn more about the rebrand in our recent blog post. In addition to the rebrand, we have incorporated a few updates this month to continue prioritizing product experiences. Here’s what they are:

New to webapp.io

• “Get help” page added to organizational dashboards to easily troubleshoot and schedule technical support:

• It’s harder for users to accidentally create duplicate accounts now. If you try to register a new account we’ll confirm that you wanted to create a new one.
• Mention reviewers in Slack: if you assign someone to a pull request and then push a new change, they will get notified in Slack:

Improved user experiences

• START IT and RE-CREATE IT buttons in the per-commit dashboard improved, now RE-CREATE IT shows a progress indicator and only rebuilds relevant runners (those with EXPOSE WEBSITE, or the one in the current tab otherwise.)
• Improved API, now easier to use webapp.io from GitHub Actions.
• Creating accounts with “log in” still leads to a short tutorial now.
• Added descriptive error for listening on 127.0.0.1, to address a common misconfiguration for EXPOSE WEBSITE.
• Optimized the performance of EXPOSE WEBSITE to make E2E tests run faster.
• Option for a "shallow clone" to make downloading a repository faster (can be enabled by your support manager upon request).
• The deployment dashboard can be viewed for every commit, regardless of if there is an EXPOSE WEBSITE included. This allows for easy debugging in any runner.
• UI improvements to recent commits page:
  

• Build timeout and preview environment timeout can be increased to over an hour (can be enabled by your support manager upon request).
• We’ve acquired new servers and migrated some of our customers with heavier build requirements over to them.
• Runs are considered to have succeeded even if waiting for a BUTTON instruction.
• Performance improvements (less time in “pending” state immediately after triggering a build)
• Subdomain routing improved. You can now have several Layerfiles with EXPOSE WEBSITES and have, e.g., storybook.run-100.cidemo.co point to the “storybook layerfile” and otherwise go to the “website layerfile”
  

Bug Fixes

• RUN REPEATABLE can now be the last instruction without unnecessary re-running.
• EXPOSE WEBSITE can now be used after CHECKPOINT disabled.
• RUN REPEATABLE and BUILD_ENV can now be used together. Users can have any number of BUILD_ENVs immediately before a RUN REPEATABLE with no performance penalty.
• Organization dashboard will be redirected if it is renamed. This resolves error in the dashboard after installing webapp.io or after another user renames the organization.
• 63+ character branches no longer cause SUBDOMAIN variables or deployment URLs to be invalid URLs. They are truncated to 63 characters.
• Duplicate account emails will no longer be created if they are case sensitive.
• Spaces in ENV and SKIP REMAINING IF directives are now allowed. e.g.: ENV a=$(echo hello)
• Improved self-serve billing allows users to alter settings after having set them up initially.
• RUN BACKGROUND directive now shows logs more reliably.
• Improvements to the performance and stability of snapshots, which were causing rare “internal server errors”
  

Events that happened during July

• Ghost Inspector and webapp.io product demo: What is automated QA and why is it important in the software delivery lifecycle? Justin Klemm, CEO of Ghost Inspector, walks through how to use Ghost Inspector and webapp.io effectively. Learn more and watch the video here: