Publishing · Branches & publishing

For developers

Underneath, a save is a commit pushed to the preview branch (in the background, a few seconds after the last change), and publishing promotes those files to the live branch — in Orbit by default, or through your git host’s review with goLive: pullRequest. A request to publish is a small file in the repo (orbit.requests.json on the preview branch). Details at the bottom of Unpublished shows the branches, and Undo last publish reverts the most recent publish so it shows as unpublished again.

Two shapes, driven by config

branches:
  default: preview     # the preview (testing) branch saves go to
  live: main           # the branch your live site is built from (default main)

Separate preview branch (default: preview, live: main) — the usual flow: saves go to preview, publishing takes them live.
One branch (default and live are the same) — there’s no preview step: saving keeps changes on this computer, and Publish puts them live directly.

Preview & live links

Set the built URLs and Orbit adds Preview ↗ to the Page tab and a link at the top of Unpublished:

site:
  previewUrl: https://preview.example.com
  liveUrl: https://example.com

Set up (developers)

Create the preview branch on your remote (e.g. preview) and set it as branches.default. Set branches.live to your live branch (default main).
Set up GitHub — editors need Write access; protect the live branch and put approvers on its bypass list (step by step).
Deploy both branches so preview and live have real sites, and set site.previewUrl / site.liveUrl. See Astro’s Deploy guides for your host.