What Happens to a Preview Environment When a Pull Request Merges or Closes?

Short answer: With Bunnyshell, a pull request's ephemeral environment is destroyed automatically the moment the PR merges or closes — no manual cleanup, no follow-up ticket, no forgotten environment quietly running (and billing) for weeks afterward.

How It Works

This is controlled by a single setting on the primary environment that spawns ephemeral copies:

bns environments update-settings --id <PRIMARY_ENV_ID> \
  --destroy-ephemeral-on-pr-close

Once enabled, Bunnyshell's Git provider integration listens for the merge/close webhook and triggers a real delete pipeline — the same operation you'd run manually:

1$ bns environments delete --id 5bDn8MrEgm
2
3Environment 5bDn8MrEgm scheduled to delete with EventID V2GY16VBGR
4EventID DVbvWRj3Jd generated delete pipeline GqWe1wDRW8
5Environment 5bDn8MrEgm successfully deleted

Deletion removes the namespace and everything in it — compute, storage, ingress, the routed hostname — so nothing keeps running (or billing) after the PR's job is done.

What If You Want to Keep It a Bit Longer?

Two options: disable the auto-destroy setting for that one case via the CLI or UI before merging, or set termination protection on the specific environment (bns environments create ... --termination-protection), which exempts it from automatic teardown while leaving the setting on for everything else.

For the full mechanics — including how to add a stale-environment safety net for PRs that never formally close — see Auto-Destroy After Merge.