Show HN: Reflame – Deploy your React web apps in milliseconds
Hi HN! I've been working on Reflame since I quit my job at Brex last year, excited to finally open it up for everybody to try out! Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SohUnrjiIxk

Reflame deploys client-rendered React web apps instantly, to previews and to production.

In concrete wall-clock terms, deploys generally take:

- ~50-500ms from our VSCode extension

- ~500-3000ms from our GitHub app

(Jump to this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134082) for what makes Reflame so fast)

The Reflame GitHub App automatically deploys default branches to production, and other branches to previews. If you've used Netlify/Vercel's GitHub apps, you should feel right at home. The difference is it’s multiple orders of magnitudes faster. Fast enough that you'll probably never see an in-progress deploy on GitHub ever again, only ready-to-go preview/production links.

No more having to babysit builds or having to context switch to and from other tasks before being able to see our changes deployed in previews or production. Previewing, sharing, and even shipping, can now become part of the so-called inner loop, giving us the superpower to stay in flow state for much longer.

The Reflame VSCode extension is yet another order of magnitude faster than even the GitHub App. It was designed to offer an experience that can rival local development workflows in both speed and ergonomics, while addressing many of local dev's limitations around collaboration and production-parity. Every time we make a change (e.g. by saving a file), the extension will deploy that change (in ~50-500ms) to a "Live Preview", and will immediately update the app in our browsers to reflect that change.

Live Previews can operate in one of two modes:

- Development mode delivers updates through React Fast Refresh, offering the familiar state-preserving instant feedback loop we know and love from local development workflows.

- Production mode delivers updates by triggering a full browser reload on every change, and in exchange for this extra bit of friction, we get to develop against a byte-identical version of the fully optimized production deployment that customers will see once we ship, with a tighter feedback loop than was ever possible before.

Live Previews deliver updates over the internet, meaning we can effortlessly test out our changes on multiple devices simultaneously, and show our changes to anyone in the world, just by sharing a Live Preview link, all while having our updates reflected automatically across all connected devices in real-time (with live reload or React Fast Refresh over the internet).

Being able to ship quickly is valuable on its own, but Reflame's true north star has always been to enable customers to ship quickly with confidence.

One way Reflame helps customers ship with more confidence today is by making previews with full production-parity available at every step of the development process. Previews in Reflame are accessible at the exact same URL customers will use to access the production deployment, instead of at a different subdomain for each preview (i.e. every preview is accessed through https://reflame.app instead of at https://some-branch-of-reflamedotapp.reflame-previews.dev). Behind the scenes, this is implemented using session cookies that our CDN will check to determine which version of the app to serve.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. We have some really exciting prototypes around testing and typechecking that we've been exploring that could allow us to ship with even more confidence without ever slowing us down.

If any of this sounds interesting for the apps you're building or planning to build (taking into account this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134092) below describing what Reflame is not well suited for), please sign up and give it a try!

I can't wait to see what you’ll build with it! :)