intermediate

Preview deployments

Create disposable review environments for product, QA, accessibility, and stakeholder validation before production.

Preview deployments create temporary environments for a branch or pull request. They help reviewers inspect UI, accessibility, integrations, copy, and stakeholder behavior before production.

Typical flow: PR opened → build artifact → deploy to ephemeral URL → comment link on PR → destroy on merge or close.

| Concern | Practice | |---------|----------| | Data | Seeded fixtures, not production | | Secrets | Scoped preview credentials | | Cost | Auto teardown TTL | | Access | Auth or IP allowlist |

On interviews: isolation, seeded data, secrets in previews, lifecycle cleanup, cost controls, limits of screenshots-only review.

Common pitfalls: previews sharing production data or credentials; no teardown; public URLs without access control.

The trade-off is richer review signal versus infra cost and data-governance risk.

Checklist:

Isolate preview resources.
Automate teardown on PR close.
Use previews for real behavior review.
Never point previews at production databases.