local-preview

A local-first preview-deployment orchestrator: every commit of a registered git repository becomes a servable preview at its own subdomain (<sha>-<repo>.preview.localhost:8080), built once, deduplicated by content, and served from a single binary.

local-preview resolves each commit into a (frontend artifact, backend artifact) pair by content-addressing the relevant subtrees. Commits that don't touch the frontend (or backend) reuse the existing artifact — and the already-running backend process. Backend state follows git lineage: a new backend version forks its data from the nearest deployed ancestor, so previews feel continuous on a straight line of commits while divergent branches can never corrupt each other.

Install

uv tool install local-preview

This installs the binary to ~/.local/bin/preview. Make sure to have that on your PATH.

Run

preview serve

The server listens on :8080. Open http://localhost:8080/ for the dashboard.

Or with Docker Compose:

docker compose up -d

📖 Documentation

Full documentation lives at https://jmelahman.github.io/local-preview/:

• Quickstart — register a repo, deploy a commit, open the preview.
• Configuration — flags and env vars.
• REST API — endpoints exposed by the running server.
• CLI — serve, repo, deploy, install-hook.