Tool

Shipwright CLI

A zero-config deployment CLI that turns any Dockerfile into a preview environment per pull request.

Project data

Small teams wanted per-branch previews but could not justify a platform team to maintain them.

The tool had to run anywhere Docker runs, without a hosted control plane.

How it was built

Six phases from the first conversation to the release. The bar shows how the time was split.

4 weeks in total

Research
Timing real pull requests showed that waiting for previews, not building them, cost the most time.
2 days · Pipeline timings
Architecture
Data model, rendering strategy and API contracts were agreed before the first screen was drawn.
3 days · ADR, data model
Interface
A component inventory and responsive layouts, built entirely from design tokens.
2 days · Token set, component inventory
Build
Features went live in small slices behind flags, with typed boundaries between client and server.
8 days · Feature slices
Testing
Unit, end-to-end and accessibility checks ran on every pull request.
3 days · Test suite in CI
Deployment
Every branch got a preview environment; the production rollout was a single click.
2 days · Preview and release pipeline
Result
Adopted by 300+ repositories; the average preview is live 12 seconds after a push.
View the source code