Cleaning Up After Myself

Alright, another day, another quick post.

I didn’t do anything huge today, just a couple of small tweaks, but the tech behind it is actually pretty neat. One thing I really like about Vercel is how it handles GitHub branches. Every time you create a new branch, it automatically spins up a forked version of your Neon DB database. That’s honestly amazing. It makes testing new features super easy since you’re never touching production data.

That’s exactly how this blog works. All the posts live in a Neon DB backend, and I’m using Prisma to talk to it. Smooth setup, no complaints there.

The issue I kept running into was Dependabot. Every time it wanted to update packages, it would create two branches, one for dev dependencies and one for production dependencies. Normally, that’s fine… except Neon’s free tier only allows 10 child database branches, and those forks don’t clean themselves up automatically.

So yeah, that limit adds up fast.

Today’s fix was setting up a GitHub Actions workflow that automatically cleans up the database branch once a PR gets merged into main. Simple, effective, and way less annoying than manually deleting forks all the time.

Anyway, I’ll drop a link to the workflow if you’re curious. One problem solved which probably means the next one is right around the corner 😅

https://github.com/italicninja/blog/blob/main/.github/workflows/cleanup-neondb-branches.yml

Later days!