How to use PageBuilder Deployer's deployment preview functionality for testing bundle code changes
When your developer team introduces changes to bundle code, these changes have direct impact on previously configured pages, templates, and resolvers.
Changes can be bug fixes on server-side render, front-end CSS, new capabilities, or architectural changes, like introducing new custom fields to your content sources, adding new output types, or deprecating them.
Most of our clients utilize unit or other programmatical testing methods to automate regressions when making these type of code changes. Unless you are running end-to-end tests (frameworks like Cypress, Playwright, Selenium) with utilizing PB-Data exports from your production environment to simulate production environment, programmatic tests do not cover real life cases with production data.
The PageBuilder Deployer tool already has blue/green deployments where your developers can deploy a bundle code, and make it on standby and be able to swap these slots with “live” version. This process is a best practice in a software delivery ecosystem that allows quick rollbacks when needed.
A capability tied to Deployer’s blue/green architecture is called “Deployment Previews” and can be used for testing code changes in Production (or other environments) before switching these deployments live.
Deployer’s Deployment Previews
The way PageBuilder Deployer keeps these ready-to-go-live bundles (we call them “on-deck bundles”) is actually as fully deployed AWS environments with version of your bundle. Each on-deck deployment slot in a way, a copy of live environment with different bundle code.
The Deployer tool provides a “Preview” function for each on-deck deployment that opens a special preview window that runs same pages and URLs of your site with that particular deployment.
To access this, open PageBuilder, navigate to Deployer (under the Developer Tools menu), click more (… icon) in the deployment you want to preview, then click “Preview” option from the menu:
This option opens a Preview mode with a toolbar at the top showing which deployment is being previewed and a site selector. You can change the site to preview your deployment with a specific site.
You can also navigate within this preview mode that will preserve the preview links so you can test a feature used in a deeper page.
Keep in mind that both your content and page configuration from PageBuilder Editor will be using “live” and published configurations using code changes your team deployed. This is particularly useful to perform regression for a deployment before it goes live.
Manually adding ?d parameter to access preview URLs
The Deployer Preview page effectively opens your website (from arcpublishing.com domain, not CDN) in an iframe with a few parameters added to the URL in order to render your page with the specific non-live deployment. Currently this parameter is d parameter in the URL query string. The value of this parameter corresponds to the deployment id that is being displayed in deployer UI.
The way origin servers resolve the live traffic is to pass a “live” alias to Engine when your live traffic (live URLs) omits this parameter. You can add this parameter with the desired deployment ID on your live URLs and they will work similar to the Preview page.
While manually appending live URLs with the d parameter is possible, we don’t guarantee this method’s availability and officially do not support it (see below notice).
Another thing to note here is that only on-deck deployments are valid preview-able deployments. Past deployments that are terminated will be not accessible and not be available for preview.
In legacy PageBuilder versions, this parameter used to be v. It may work in some URLs but it is not supported and will be deprecated in the future releases.