Testing PR IRL

[melitele]

Recently I fixed an issue in maplibre-gl-js, tested with unit tests, render tests, local deployment etc. Despite all that my fix introduced a regression bug that was discovered after my PR was merged and the new version of maplibre-gl-js released. There is a good chance that this regression bug would be caught and fixed prior to release if we had an easy way of testing PR by the person reporting the issue.

Currently testing a PR requires setting up development environment which is not a trivial ask.

If a bundle with an unmerged PR published automatically, it could be used by the person reporting the issue instead of maplibre-gl-js unpkg url thus providing possibility for additional testing prior to merging the PR. Also it would be easier to verify that the PR works if the issue has a jsbin.

One possibility is a github workflow that builds a minified bundle for every PR that graduates from draft and publishes it to gh-pages.

Is there a better way to do it?

[HarelM]

Currently the build artifacts are uploaded to the PR, so in theory, one could use those, but it's not very practical.
Also from my experience, even if there's a build somewhere, people don't use it and only use an official version that was released.
It happened a few times before even when we released a pre-release version to npm...
So I'm regretful to say that I didn't find a good solution to this issue, and I totally sympathize with your pain as someone who pushed bugs to production systems...

[HarelM]

Check out the summary of the tests job:
https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js/actions/runs/17507752058

There are multiple artifacts there including the build output.

[melitele]

Thank you, I can see the artifacts now when I scroll down :-). I can download the bundle but is there a way to link to it? Meaning a link that can be used with the <script> tag, for instance in jsbin for a quick test that the PR fixes the reported issue?

[HarelM]

I'm guessing one can write some code to download it and unzip, but it's far from a good developer experience.
We can consider using gh-pages for this although I'm not super keen about uploading every PR build to GitHub pages.
GenAI also suggested netlify which I'm not familiar with...

[HarelM]

Maybe uploading it to github packages is a possible solution to this, allowing to install it from there, and maybe deleting when the PR closes... IDK...
If you can make it work on a fork (or any example repo) I'll be happy to understand the limitations and capabilities of this...

[melitele]

I'm not super keen about uploading every PR build to GitHub pages

Me neither. It seemed simple when I first thought of it but a bundle for a PR would be an ephemeral object that should disappear after PR is merged and GitHub pages are opposite of that, they would want to store it forever in history.

Looks like there is no existing/obvious/easy solution. The discussion has been very helpful. I'll play around with the idea for a bit...