Persistent preview environment

[rchlfryn]

Description

We would like to have a dedicated preview environment for testing that is not destroyed during routine deployments. This environment should be automatically updated whenever a commit is pushed, but not completely start from our seed data.

Problem Statement

Currently, our preview environments are ephemeral and gets torn down regularly, making it difficult to run comprehensive tests and demo things. We need a stable environment where data is not removed.

Proposed Solution

Create a persistent preview testing environment that:

• Is not destroyed during routine maintenance or deployments
• Data remains available for continuous testing

Notes

The biggest lift will be how we handle migrations and when to run them
Tools for copying data from one Payload environment to another

[busbyk]

• Gets automatically upgraded each time production is upgraded

What do you mean by upgraded? On a new deployment?

This environment should be automatically updated whenever production is upgraded, ensuring it stays in sync with production code while remaining stable for ongoing test execution.

How are you envisioning this will be different than our current dev environment? Currently, dev is synced with production nightly. The sync-prod-to-dev workflow runs every night which creates a fresh db for dev with production data + it "sanitizes" that production data. When we merge to main the development workflow also pulls prod data so that the dev environment data matches production.

How would this env differ from that?

[rchlfryn]

@busbyk I think we discussed this awhile ago, but I updated the description. TLDR don't blow away the preview DBs every time we push.