Environments & Branch Deploys

Production, PR previews, and optional branch deploys on Launchpad -- how preview databases work and how to password-protect non-production URLs.

Launchpad supports three kinds of environments for a project:

Production

Your tracked branch (usually main) always deploys to your project's production environment -- the URL you share with the world.

Pull request previews

When you open a pull request against your tracked branch, Launchpad automatically builds a preview deployment at its own URL (pr--.hosting.yaeris.com), so you can review changes before merging. Preview deployments are automatically torn down when the PR is closed.

Previews require a preview database. Because Strapi and Payload both run schema migrations automatically on boot, a preview environment must never share your production database -- doing so risks a destructive PR migrating (and corrupting) your live data. Set a PREVIEW_DATABASE_URL under Environment Variables (preview kind) before opening a PR, or preview deployments will be skipped.

Branch deploys (optional)

By default, only your tracked branch and pull requests deploy. If you want every branch pushed to your repo to get its own preview URL (e.g. feature/new-editor), turn on Deploy any branch under your project's Settings. This is off by default -- existing projects are unaffected unless you turn it on.

Branch deploys share the same preview-database requirement as PR previews, and are capped at 10 concurrent branch environments per project to protect shared hosting capacity. A branch deploy isn't automatically removed when its branch is deleted on GitHub -- clean up old branch deploys manually if you no longer need them.

Deployment protection

You can password-protect every non-production environment (previews and branch deploys) for a project from Settings. This never applies to your production URL.