How to Tear Down a Preview Environment When a PR Closes in GitHub Actions

Run a cleanup job on the pull_request closed event, keyed on the same PR number you deployed to, so merged and abandoned PRs free their resources.

The closed type fires for both merges and abandons. Use the same per-PR identifier from deploy time to target the exact environment, then run your destroy command.

Steps

• Trigger on pull_request type closed.
• Recompute the per-PR name from github.event.pull_request.number.
• Run the destroy command for that environment.

Workflow

on:
  pull_request:
    types: [closed]
jobs:
  teardown:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      PREVIEW_NAME: pr-${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: ./destroy-preview.sh --name "$PREVIEW_NAME"

Gotchas

• closed covers both merge and close, so one job handles every exit path.
• Make the destroy step idempotent so a re-run on an already-deleted environment still succeeds.

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