Preview Deployments Overview

Preview Deployments allow you to preview changes to your app in a live deployment without merging those changes to your Git project's production branch. Members of your Vercel Team and people you share your previews with can give feedback on these changes via Comments if enabled.

Preview Deployments are available by default for all projects. You create one when:

• You commit changes to a Git branch with an open Pull Request
• You create a deployment using our CLI's vercel command

If you'd rather not generate Preview Deployments, check out our instructions for turning them off.

You can receive feedback on your Preview Deployments from Vercel Team members and people you share the Preview URL with via the Comments feature.

Comments allow teams and participants outside the team to give direct feedback on Preview Deployments. Comments can be added directly over the areas of your site that are relevant to the feedback, and discussion threads can continue within the Preview Deployment itself or in an integrated Slack channel.

Learn more in the Comments docs.

The Preview URL is updated to reflect the latest deployment changes.

You can see the Preview URL when creating a pull or merge request using Git. It contains the name of the person or team to which the Project belongs.

If you request a Preview URL, the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header is set as noindex. This ensures that search engines like Google do not index the Preview URLs.

When assigning a custom domain to a preview Git branch, you can prevent this behavior. In this case, the X-Robots-Tag header is not set with the value noindex.

You can learn more about the X-Robots-Tag by reviewing this Google Search Reference.

All your preview deployments will have a "Share Preview" button which can be used to share access for private preview URLs with all team members.

Click the share preview button to get access to the deployment URLs.

Use this menu to access preview links toward your "branch deployment" and "commit deployment".

A preview link for a branch deployment shows the latest changes made to your git branch and deployed to Vercel. The content for a branch deployment usually changes over time. Therefore, it should always reflect the current development state.

A preview link for a commit deployment shows only one deployment, regardless of whether you have made changes. It is like a "pinned" immutable deployment in which the state can be accessed directly via the commit deployment link.

It's recommended to use the branch deployment preview links as they are up to date with the latest commit changes.

Based on your URL selection type, you can either visit the link directly or "click to copy" the deployment URL and share it with team members. Moreover, Enterprise team accounts will have logs access for those who generated a link and reflect this data in audit logs.

You can turn off Preview Deployments by using the "Ignore Build Step" option. For example, using this command, you can tell Vercel to only build your main branch and ignore all other branches. If the command returns "0", the build is skipped. If, however, a code "1" or greater is returned, a new deployment is built. For more information on ignoring the build step, see How do I use the "Ignored Build Step" field on Vercel?.