Preview deployment
A preview deployment is a temporary, private copy of a website built from a branch or pull request, so changes can be checked at a real address before they go live.
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What it is
Hosts such as Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare build every push to a branch and give it its own URL. Reviewers open that link instead of running the project themselves, and the production site is untouched until the branch is merged.
Preview deployments are built the same way as production, so they catch build and configuration problems early.
In Xodia
Xodia has three kinds of preview. While you edit, your site runs in a live preview in your browser that updates as you type. On Xodia hosting with a custom domain, the site's xodia.site address is its Preview: updates can go there first, hidden from search engines and with an optional password, before your domain changes. When you push to a branch on GitHub, your own host builds its own preview deployment from that branch, and Publishing in Project settings shows its status.
Go live puts the site on Xodia hosting; Deploy merges into your live branch instead, and your own host deploys it.
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Related terms
- Branch previewA branch preview is a running copy of a website from one git branch, so work on that branch can be seen and tested without changing the live site.
- StagingStaging is a copy of a website where changes are checked before they go live, usually built from a separate branch and kept away from visitors and search engines.
- Draft modeDraft mode is a way for a site to show unpublished content to editors, such as a draft post in a CMS, while visitors keep seeing only what has been published.