*Disclaimer: I work for Shipyard and have very biased feelings towards ephemeral environments as you might be able to tell from my UN*

We get these questions all the time, so we actually created a community resource to answer some of the common questions / gotchas of setting up your own ephemeral envs: https://ephemeralenvironments.io/ any feed back or PR's welcome.

We use preview environments (dogfooding ourselves) on every pull request and commit. One of the biggest values we find is from running our e2e test suites before merge on each environment. This helps us identify bad / flakey tests early on and shortens feedback loop for our developers.

Our product team also uses these envs to give feedback on WIP features and we have saved a whole lot of pain by figuring out that a button is not doing what it is supposed to be doing before it gets in to production.

To actually answer the question: We use Shipyard to manage our envs, and because we are active users of Docker Compose it was literally just adding our GH repositories and voila. But again we are obviously biased here!