Manual deploy branch preview - permament or timeout?

[zenseb]

Hi,

I’m building my project externally to Netlify and deploying it by the netlify cli using the --alias flag. As far as I understand, this is a branch deploy. Do these branch draft URLs persist indefinitely or do they eventually expire?

Thanks

[luke]

Hi, @zenseb. My most detailed answer about this is found here:

Trunk-based development questions

Hi, @jega. It sounds like you are considering using a unique site for each “trunk”. I was going to recommend this myself. If you are using different git branches then using our branch subdomain feature makes sense. You are not using different git branches so this won’t work for you. The next best workaround is just to use different sites as you have suggested. Also, I want to warn you about a “false workaround”. It is a possible solution some people have already tried and it doesn’t work. So,…

To summarize: They are not branch deploys. The URL will persist until the site is deleted but those --alias prefixes do not behave like branch deploys.

If there are other questions after reading the post above, please let us know.

[zenseb]

Thanks for your answer. Ok I understand that this is not a proper branch deploy, but could you clarify what these alias deploys are?

I read the other forum posts and I understand it’s to be used to create predictable deploy URLS. That is all I want for testing purposes and I want to be able to create many aliases based on the branch name from CI.

What are the concrete restrictions of using the --alias cli option? One I found recently is the 37 character limit. Do these predictable URLs persist permamently so they can be relied on months later? Are there any reasons not to build it into my CI workflow?

Thanks

[fool]

Heya @zenseb - I’m not sure of the best workflow for you, but have proxied the queries around the CLI’s behavior with --alias to some experts who might be able to help us out.

I can tell you that:

• the names aren’t temporary and as of today, will persist for as long as you don’t delete the site. We may change this in the future (every deploy is always available forever), but it would take some major work on our side so it won’t happen very soon at least!
• you probably shouldn’t even be using --alias JUST for the purpose of creating domain aliases which you can also configure via our API. These WOULD always work, forever, as long as you keep DNS pointing to us, since they would reflect the current production deploy (whereas the --alias deploys potentially would get out of sync unless you ran the CLI X times for X aliases, each time you updated your site’s code).