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How to create a staging version of your site

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Get Really Good at Git

A step-by-step tutorial on deploying a version of your website based on a GitHub Pull Request on Netlify

I was in the process of launching a course, and I needed to finalize the landing page that would be up on the “launch day”, without however changing the current version of the site I had up for the public.

I am using Netlify which makes it easy to automatically deploy the website from a Git branch, in my case hosted on GitHub. I will document this process. Other hosting providers that base their CI/CD on a Git repository might have a similar tool in place.

Netlify automatically builds deploy previews for Pull Requests.

So what I did is, I created a new branch, which I called launch, and started working on it by adding a few commits, then I created a Pull Request, something that GitHub Desktop makes very easy:

Immediately after I sent the PR in, Netlify started its Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipeline:

And switching to the Netlify website, I can see it automatically picked up the Pull Request branch, and started a deploy preview:

After a few minutes, I got a new URL for the website and I used that to go on with the course launch preparation, while the main domain still pointed to the master branch code.

Are you intimidated by Git? Can’t figure out merge vs rebase? Are you afraid of screwing up something any time you have to do something in Git? Do you rely on ChatGPT or random people’s answer on StackOverflow to fix your problems? Your coworkers are tired of explaining Git to you all the time? Git is something we all need to use, but few of us really master it. I created this course to improve your Git (and GitHub) knowledge at a radical level. A course that helps you feel less frustrated with Git. Launching Summer 2024. Join the waiting list!

Here is how can I help you: