there is already a feature to do that - if you include [skip ci] in your commit message, we won’t build. I understand that you probably don’t want to prefix all your commit messages with that, but it is possible.
I don’t think we have plans to change the “how you specify what we build” setup in other ways anytime soon, but we do have an open feature request to allow badges for other branches to which I’ve added this thread for followup in case we ship it.
In the meantime there are some other potential workarounds for you:
- locked deploys - we still build everything, but never autopublish it: Manage deploys | Netlify Docs . This is what we use to disable autopublishing e.g. before a major release. You can publish an existing deploy via our API
- give your build script some other smart logic to check if this one is an intended build and build it only in case it matches some pattern (e.g. only build merge requests)
- try filtering the webhooks sent to netlify using a service like zapier (“oh, that’s a PR that says
WIPin its commit message; don’t forward this one to Netlify!”)