webapp.io product update – March 2021
Our team has been working hard to unveil some awesome product updates to kick-off 2021. Here’s a breakdown of what we’ve launched at webapp.io this past month.
Summary:
- webapp.io now supports GitLab.com and self-hosted GitLab
- Introducing webapp.io Deployments - persistent and full stack preview environments on your domain
- Organizational permissions enhancement per user
- Delightful additions to webapp.io includes adding your own logo to the dashboard
- We're hiring software developers
- webapp.io now supports GitLab.com and self-hosted GitLab
Since our company began, we have been a member of the GitHub ecosystem as a GitHub application. However, we have always considered the possibility of expanding beyond this to reach a wider community.
We have heard your requests and have integrated with GitLab to continue to make webapp.io available to as many software developers as possible. This is an exciting moment for new users, as webapp.io is one of the only CI/CD alternatives to GitLab CI in the GitLab ecosystem. webapp.io integrates with both the self-managed version of GitLab and the SaaS version of GitLab.
The installation and onboarding is self directed here.
2. Introducing webapp.io Deployments
You have probably seen the rising popularity of static sites generators and static deployment platforms (such as Netlify and Vercel) for frontend development preview workflows. webapp.io has adapted that state-of-the-art workflow to full-stack sites, as easily as creating a rule in our deployments page.
You can leverage the same cache to run CI tests and spin up persistent full stack preview environments that are copies of your production environment hosted on your own domain.
Deployments specify a rule that links each branch to one of your subdomains. A commit to the "fix-landing" branch might be available at "fix-landing.demo.example.com", and that link could easily be shared with folks working on product or design.
The existing benefits of our CI offering extend to deployments. If you're using Amazon S3 to store fake database data, for example, you only have to migrate data once and webapp.io will duplicate the state of the database for future deployments without needing to redownload anything.
Installation is quite easy - we've set up automatic https termination for your deployments, so any subdomains work out of the box. All you have to do is set up an appropriate Layerfile and create a deployment rule.
You can add multiple rules in the Deployments workflow. In the picture below, rule #1 indicates: for the domain "demo.layerci.com" if the branch matches anything, and if the repository name equals "layerci", then create a deployment for that branch.
3. Organizational permissions enhancement per user
For owners of organizations, there are now more fine grained permission opportunities for each of your teammates.
Roles include "Members" or "Owners"
4. Delightful additions to webapp.io
Besides our dashboard's new appearance and the major features above, we've made many smaller changes to improve the day-to-day experience of using webapp.io.
Put your own logo on the webapp.io dashboard to make it yours
Users can now request to upload their logo to the webapp.io dashboard for their organization. We're always looking for more ways to make users feel like VIPs from day one.
Here's an example of a fake company "Slonk" with its logo added to the main dashboard of webapp.io:
Installing webapp.io on a new repository just became easier
We've updated our "new installation" button to make it easier to create new layerfiles in multiple repositories.
Pipeline levels with toggles for VMs and deploy buttons
A great piece of feedback we've received from our customers is to group VMs, test logs, and deploy buttons to the layerfiles they are associated with. When you click on a layerfile with actions such as BUTTON instructions or EXPOSE WEBSITE instructions, a dropdown will appear directly on the layerfile.
5. We're hiring software developers!
Excited about what we're building at webapp.io? We're hiring talented front-end and backend developers to continue building the next generation of DevOps for our customers around the world. Check out our careers page here for openings.
That's all for now! As always, thank you to our wonderful team and users for continuously improving webapp.io.