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4 Comments

How to deploy for testing/reviews without actually launching?

Using Laravel here.

The project is under work, but I would like to deploy it so I can have friends view it and give their comments.

I don't want any other traffic at this stage, or that potentially I will be found on search results. I just want to share it with select people.

How did you deal with it?

  1. 3

    I just put stuff out there publicly but didn't tell anyone about it. If no one knows, chances are they won't go there. If you want to stop search engines from indexing your pages you can stop them with robots.txt. But even if they did index you, you won't rank unless you're deploying to an established site.

    Another option that would lock unwanted people out is just make the first page of your app require a hard-coded secret phrase and only share that with friends.

    Better yet, make it read from a query param and autofill that to unlock the app, then share that link with the query param filled in to your friends.

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    I'm in the process right now actually, I just have a private repo on github, linked it to Heroku, and ran a post build script. Once the site was built I just gave the URL out to a select few people. Even googling the exact URL the search results didn't come up with anything, as it wasn't indexed by Google in the first place. So you should be good to do something similar.

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      Sounds like a great solution - can you elaborate on what is the post build script for? Is it a laravel thing? because I couldn't find info on that.

  3. 1

    Create a subdomain, (i.e. preview.domain.com) and upload your files in that subdomain only. Depending on your server setup, there are ways to password protect the subdomain as well as block web crawlers from accessing it. I do this often to show my clients the progress of the website I'm currently building for them.

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