What we’ve been up to
Back in July we announced our alpha release of Gatsby Preview. The team has been hard at work since getting your feedback and incorporating it into Gatsby Preview product.
We’re excited to announce Gatsby Preview is now in beta! To the many people that have signed up to try Preview, we’ll be inviting more and more of you over the coming weeks. Gatsby Preview will continue to be invite-only until we’ve worked with enough customers that we’re confident of the usability, reliability, and scalability of our platform.
In beta, we will only be supporting Gatsby sites using Contentful.
What Gatsby Preview can do for you and your team
In a traditional CMS setup, content creators and editors can preview their changes before they go live. Without Gatsby Preview, teams using Gatsby needed to set up their own preview infrastructure or do without. This was a problem because content teams need to see what changes they’re making as it’s happening. And assuming teams had time to create their own preview infrastructure, it was still a time-consuming process. We wanted to solve this for teams using Gatsby.
With Gatsby Preview beta, you can connect your GitHub repositories and Contentful CMS to our service, and get a live URL where content creators can see their changes in context before going live. Want to check on your new article title, or look at the changes you made to your post? Gatsby Preview lets you see it!
What’s new with Gatsby Preview beta
For the beta version of Gatsby Preview, we focused on adding a UI over the existing functionality, made the initial set-up less manual, and added ways for your team to get involved. In beta, we’ll only be supporting Gatsby sites managed through the Contentful CMS with support for other CMS platforms coming soon.
Easier set up
We’ve added the ability for you to sign up to Gatsby Preview with your GitHub account and quickly add existing repositories. You’ve now got the option to add or edit your environment variables, pull up the preview link, and view your build logs—right from the dashboard interface!
Easier sharing
We know it’s important for you and your team to share work, so we’ve added a contributors feature that lets you invite team members to Gatsby Preview with one click. You’ll be able to add contributors to one site or the entire organization, so you can share the right sites with the right people on your team.
Easier client management
With agencies in mind, we’re making it easier for your clients to preview the site you’ve been working on, too. Just send them the preview URL, or add them to your GitHub repository and invite them as a contributor to Gatsby Preview so they can view their site using the Gatsby Preview dashboard. Every time a content change is typed into Contentful, your client can see the change through their Gatsby Preview URL!
For agencies that have several clients on Contentful, or if you’re managing multiple repos, the Gatsby Preview dashboard lets you set up, view, and manage multiple sites in one place.
Easier troubleshooting
We know it’s particularly frustrating if something fails to build but there’s no way to troubleshoot it. With beta, you’ll be able to see the status of your current preview instance, view or copy your build logs, and trigger a rebuild of your preview instance.
See how you can troubleshoot and add or remove contributors:
How to sign up
We’re currently running a closed beta for Gatsby Preview. Sign up here to get added to the waitlist.
Gatsby Preview Docs
Once you’ve been invited to Gatsby Preview, you can view the documentation for integrating Preview with the CMS platforms that are supported on GatsbyJS.com.
What’s coming next
The initial invites for the closed beta have just gone out! We’ll be talking directly with beta users so we can continue learning and make the experience even better.
Curious to see Gatsby Preview in action? Watch our short demo to see how it works: