CodeSandbox CI

What is CodeSandbox CI?

CodeSandbox CI is a GitHub app (opens in a new tab) that you can install in your repository. The app is responsible for building your library. Whenever a Pull Request is opened it builds a version of the library from that PR. This is published to our registry, so you can immediately test the library in CodeSandbox or locally without publishing to npm or elsewhere.

Why do I want this?

The goal of this app is to make it easier for you to test your library without publishing to npm yet. Since CodeSandbox is already used for bug reports we wanted to make it possible to also test the PR version of your library with the existing bug reports.

How does it work?

A typical workflow might look like this:

Someone opens an issue for a bug with a sandbox reproducible
Someone opens a fix PR mentioning the issue
We build the library from the PR, fork the sandbox repro and install the new library in that sandbox. This way you will only have to open the generated sandbox to confirm that the fix works with no need to clone, install or test locally.

How do I set this up?

For most libraries, the only thing you need to do is install this GitHub App (opens in a new tab). In some cases you might need to do some configuration, an example of this is for monorepos. You can configure your library by creating a file called ci.json in a folder called .codesandbox (.codesandbox/ci.json) in the root of your repo. An example PR can be found here (opens in a new tab).

Note: CodeSandbox CI only works in public repositories for now. Send us an e-mail to [email protected] if you're interested to set this up for your private repositories.

Configuration

You can configure how your projects build on CodeSandbox CI by creating a file called ci.json in a folder called .codesandbox in the root of your repository.

Configuration Format

These are all the configuration options you can set. They are all optional.

{
  // Which script in package.json to run to install instead of `npm ci` or `yarn install`,
  // can be `false` if you want to skip this step.
  "installCommand": "install",
  // Which script in package.json to run to build,
  // can be `false` if you want to skip this step.
  "buildCommand": "build",
  // If you have a monorepo, put the paths of the packages here. We'll infer the package names.
  // Globs are supported.
  "packages": ["packages/react", "packages/react-dom"],
  // If you don't publish from the package directory, specify per dependency
  // where the contents of the built dependency are. These files will be uploaded
  // to our registry.
  "publishDirectory": {
    "react": "build/node_modules/react",
    "react-dom": "build/node_modules/react-dom"
  },
  // A list of Browser Sandboxes that you want generated for a PR, if this list
  // is not set we will default to `vanilla`. The built library will automatically
  // be installed in the fork of these sandboxes in the place of the library. So if
  // you have a sandbox with `lodash`, and you built `lodash` and `vue`, we will only
  // replace `lodash` with the built version.
  // You can also set absolute paths to a directory in your repository. We will make sure
  // to generate a sandbox from the contents of that directory.
  // Currently, Devboxes are not supported.
  "sandboxes": ["vanilla", "new", "/examples/todomvc"],
  // Node.js version to use for building the PR.
  // Supported versions are "10" (10.24.1, default), "12" (12.22.12), "14" (14.21.1),
  // "16" (16.18.1) and "18" (18.12.1).
  "node": "18"
}

Monorepo Example

Monorepos are quite common, here's an example configuration for a monorepo:

{
  "packages": ["./", "packages/vue-template-compiler"]
}

This builds two libraries: vue, which is in the root of the repository, and vue-template-compiler, which resides in the packages folder.

We automatically infer your packages from your lerna config or yarn workspaces config if packages is not set.

We handle auto linking of these dependencies, this means that we rewrite the dependencies to the newly built versions of CodeSandbox CI. In this example, vue uses vue-template-compiler, so we've updated package.json of vue to point to our built vue-template-compiler.

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