Circuitdeploy stands up a full-stack, production-shaped environment for every pull request — real database, real services, real seed data — then tears the whole thing down the second you merge. No staging queue. No leftover infra. No surprise bill at the end of the month.
$ circuit up
→ cloning checkout-redesign @ a91f3c2
→ provisioning: web · api · postgres · redis
→ seeding db from snapshot prod-lite
✓ env ready in 38.2s
🔗 https://pr-482.circuitdeploy.app
✓ posted preview link to GitHubPlugged into the stacks shipping teams already run
Circuitdeploy reads your repo, maps your services, and stands up the whole stack — so reviewers test the actual change, not a guess about how it might behave.
Frontend, backend, queues, cron, and dependent microservices all come up together and talk over private networking — the same shape as production, down to the service mesh.
Every PR forks its own database from a sanitized production snapshot. Run a destructive migration, trash the data, drop a table — it never touches another branch or another engineer.
The instant a PR merges or closes, the whole environment is torn down and its compute, networking, and storage reclaimed. Nothing lingers. Nothing keeps billing while you sleep.
Comment /circuit rebuild to redeploy, /circuit seed prod-lite to reload data, or /circuit logs api to tail a service. Reviewers steer the environment without ever leaving GitHub.
Layer caching and pre-baked base images bring most environments up in under a minute — fast enough to wait on with the PR still open, not slow enough to switch tasks over.
What ephemeral does to a review cycle
Connect once. From then on the loop runs itself — open, preview, review, reclaim.
Install the GitHub or GitLab app and point Circuitdeploy at one config file. It infers your services, ports, and build steps on the first run — no Terraform, no YAML sprawl.
Every pull request triggers a fresh, fully isolated environment with its own URL, database fork, and per-environment secret scope.
QA, design, and product click a live link in the PR comment and test the actual change against real-shaped data — on desktop or a phone.
Merging closes the circuit. The environment self-destructs, the meter stops, and your account drops back to zero idle infrastructure.
Drop a circuit.toml in the repo root. These are the shapes teams ship with — copy one, change the service names, push a branch.
A web service on port 3000, a Postgres fork seeded from prod-lite, migrations run on boot. The default for most product repos.
An HTTP API, a background worker on the same image, and a Redis instance for the queue — all on private networking, no public worker port.
Web, admin, and a Go gateway built from one turborepo. Each gets its own subdomain under the PR's preview URL.
Pull Stripe and Auth0 test keys from your vault at boot, scoped to the environment and revoked on teardown. Never written to the repo.
Skip the prod snapshot and load a checked-in fixtures.sql instead — handy for open-source repos with no production data to fork.
Declare readiness probes per service so the preview link only posts to the PR once every service answers healthy.
“We deleted our shared staging server the week we adopted Circuitdeploy. Every PR is its own staging now, and nobody fights over a deploy slot anymore.”
“Branch-isolated databases changed how bravely we ship migrations. We run the scary one on a fork, watch it, and if it's wrong we close the PR and it's gone — no rollback, no incident.”
“Our designers review live code now instead of waiting for a deploy. Sign-off that used to take two days happens in the PR thread before lunch.”
Billing is metered by the minute an environment is actually alive. Merge a PR and that meter stops cold.
For open-source and side projects.
For teams shipping every day.
For regulated and high-volume orgs.
Front-end preview tools deploy your UI against shared or mocked backends. Circuitdeploy stands up the entire stack — backend services, queues, and a forked database — per pull request, so reviewers exercise the real, full system instead of just the rendered page.
Each environment forks a sanitized snapshot you designate — typically a 'prod-lite' dataset with PII masked. You write the masking rules, and the fork is destroyed with the environment on merge.
It self-destructs. Compute, networking, and the database fork are reclaimed within seconds, and metered billing for that environment stops immediately. Nothing is left running, and nothing carries into your next invoice.
No. Secrets are injected at runtime, scoped per environment, never written to the repo or build logs, and revoked the moment the environment is torn down. Enterprise plans add per-environment masking policies on top.
Yes. Enterprise plans let you register self-hosted runners inside your VPC, so source code and data never leave your infrastructure while the control plane stays fully managed by us.
Anything that builds in a container. We ship first-class detection for Node, Python, Go, Ruby, and Rust, plus Docker Compose and most monorepo layouts. If it has a Dockerfile, Circuitdeploy can stand it up.
Connect a repo and watch the first environment come up live in under a minute. No credit card to start.