Preview Environments

The PartyKit CLI lets you deploy your projects to our edge platform with partykit deploy. By default, this uses your user/team name and project name to generate a unique URL for your project. For example, if your user name is alice and your project name is my-project, your project will be deployed to https://my-project.alice.partykit.dev.

(Alternately, when deploying to your own CF account, you can pass a custom domain with partykit deploy --domain mydomain.com.)

A common software engineering pattern is to have multiple environments for your project. For example, you might have a staging environment for testing, and a production environment for your live users. You might want to deploy every github PR to its own environment so you can test it before merging.

To support this, PartyKit has a --preview flag that lets you deploy to a custom URL. Taking the original example, if you run partykit deploy --preview my-preview, your project will be deployed to https://my-preview.my-project.alice.partykit.dev. When you’re done testing your preview environment, you can then delete it with partykit delete --preview my-preview.

(When deploying to your own CF account, you can pass a custom domain with partykit deploy --domain mydomain.com --preview my-preview, and your project will be deployed to https://my-preview.mydomain.com.)

It’s that simple! In the future, we may provide a custom github action that automates this behaviour for you on every PR, but you can get started today by setting up these commands in your CI/CD pipeline.