Show HN: Anvil – From repo to live demo in seconds: simple web app sharing
demo.anvilapp.ioInteresting, but explain to me how your product is going to get me more than just using this: pagekite.net. I've used it to share features with my collaborators quite often (and especially with my UI/UX designer, quality-assurance people, etc. for front-end work) to make sure that I'm going in the right direction as I work. It essentially allows me to forward external traffic to my localhost, on which a dev server is running the code from my branch. No dockerfiles, no branches.
It's cool that you use something to share your progress. However, forwarding traffic to localhost means it's only live when your computer is running, it's prone to network issues, and it's limited to serving at your computer's speeds.
We're looking to make Dockerfile creation a lot less of a hassle, probably with a Dockerfile generator tool. We're also looking to add ways for gathering feedback to make this a stronger collaboration tool.
Okay, so it sounds like a pretty smart application of Docker containers, then. I like it.
Interesting. How is this better than just sharing the Dockerfile directly? Or just having a free instance hosted on Heroku? It's not too hard to load a container. As an example https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker makes it pretty straight forward to host discourse.
Yeah, Docker makes it pretty easy to launch containers but we’re aiming for this to be used as a quicker way to share early iterations and not as a way to host apps indefinitely. As an example, someone could attach an Anvil link to a pull request on GitHub to demo their updates so people could see changes without needing to download, build, and serve the code. You can use Heroku servers, but there would be some deployment work on your end for sharing multiple variants of multiple demos simultaneously.
Assembly (the place to crowd create a startup) wrote this blog post (http://blog.assembly.com/tools) where they share a lot of the tools they use for sharing product updates with each other. Anvil requires no work on the user’s part to create a walkthrough, and allows whoever they send their branch to to be able to interact with the demo for themselves.
Do you think it would be convenient to use Anvil when sharing your updates?
This is awesome. Many times I have looked at an open source project and wanted to look around but didn't want to take the time to download, setup, etc. This looks awesome!
Thanks! We're currently adding a way to detect web app stacks and build Dockerfiles for users so it's easier to use. We're also thinking of adding a way to build feature branches whenever there's a pull request so you can see the branch live before accepting the request.
Do you have any feedback on things that we should add or change?
It's Docker-based? cool.
Yup! We use Dockerfiles to set up the environment for the web app. We're also working on a Dockerfile generator to make this process automatic.