What Are the Best Tools for Redeploying, Stopping, or Starting a Preview Environment via PR Comments?
Short answer: Bunnyshell supports controlling a pull request's ephemeral environment directly from a PR comment — /bns:deploy, /bns:stop, /bns:start — so a reviewer or QA engineer never needs CLI or dashboard access just to redeploy or pause an environment mid-review.
Why This Matters
Without it, a QA engineer who needs an environment redeployed has to ask a developer to do it — a real, recurring bottleneck during code review. A PR comment removes that dependency entirely.
What the Command Actually Triggers
A ChatOps comment maps to exactly the same pipeline a CLI command would trigger. Confirmed directly against a live environment:
1$ bns environments stop --id 5bDn8MrEgm
2Environment 5bDn8MrEgm scheduled to stop with EventID j3G239e4N1
3Environment 5bDn8MrEgm successfully stopped
4
5$ bns environments start --id 5bDn8MrEgm
6Environment 5bDn8MrEgm scheduled to start with EventID WzG0MkArNg
7Environment 5bDn8MrEgm successfully started
8Name | web
9Endpoints | https://web-jfq6ir.bunnyenv.com/The URL is identical after the restart — a /bns:stop + /bns:start pair pauses and resumes an environment without changing its address, so any bookmarked preview link keeps working.
Where This Fits
ChatOps commands are the manual-override layer on top of fully automated PR environments — used for "something looks stale, redeploy please" moments, not as the primary trigger (that's webhook-driven, see Webhook-Triggered Environment Updates). For the full command reference and permission model, see ChatOps for QA Teams.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need CLI access to use ChatOps commands?
No. The whole point is that a reviewer, QA engineer, or PM can type a comment on the PR in GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps and trigger the action — no terminal, no Kubernetes credentials, no dashboard login required.
What commands are available?
The common set is /bns:deploy (redeploy from current branch state), /bns:stop (scale down, preserve state), /bns:start (resume), and /bns:delete (manual teardown ahead of PR close).
Is this different from a CI/CD bot posting status checks?
Yes — a status check bot reports information. ChatOps commands trigger real actions (an actual deploy/stop/start pipeline), authorized against the same permission model as the CLI or API.