Create preview deployment without a hosting provider
Our team would like to be able to generate preview deployments. We don't need a hosting provider for our app, so we're not using Vercel or Netlify. We want to be able to generate our own preview deployments, but the docs aren't clear on how to do this and AI doesn't help either. I realize preview deployments is in beta, but we don't need a lot of handholding, we just need a bit more info.
We have already tried setting
CONVEX_DEPLOY_KEY and running npx convex deploy --preview-create {branch-name}. We get a prompt asking if we want to "push your code to your prod deployment", which is not what we want.
We tried configuring an .env.preview and the running npx deploy with the --env-file option, but we don't seem to be getting the configuration quite right.
It would be awesome if the docs included configuring a GitHub action for preview deployments. 🔥
Any guidance is appreciated, thanks!5 Replies
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Thank you!
hi. CONVEX_DEPLOY_KEY is set to a preview key generated by your dashboard?
we'll update the docs to talk about generating preview deploy keys independent of the vercel/netlify pages -- this is a good point
right now those instructions are here: https://docs.convex.dev/production/hosting/vercel#preview-deployments
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if you generate a preview deploy key, and that's what's in the environment when you
deploy, it should recognize the key as a preview type and spin up a preview deployment
that's how things are working in vercel and netlify@Jamie Thank you! I just realized I had it working yesterday, but had compounded errors by not uploading assets needed to storage and using the .cloud instead of .site url (our entry point is an http action). But this is great now; we're able to deploy to dev, prod, and now branch-based preview environments. Thanks for getting back to me and motivating me to hack on a solution a bit more.