Environments & Staging
Previewing before you go live
You are building a new product listing design, a seasonal campaign page, or a structural change to your navigation. Before pushing it to production, you want to see it running with real data on a real URL. This page explains what works today, what workarounds exist, and what is coming next.
What works today
Laioutr Cloud handles production deployments end to end. When you click "Publish" in Studio, the platform builds your Nuxt application and deploys it to your configured hosting adapter. For previewing work-in-progress changes at the code level, Vercel preview deployments are the recommended path.
Vercel preview deployments
If your project uses the Vercel adapter, every branch push automatically generates a preview deployment with its own URL. This lets developers and stakeholders review frontend changes before merging to the main branch.
Push a branch
Create a feature branch in your project repository and push your changes. Vercel picks up the branch automatically.
Get the preview URL
Vercel generates a unique URL for the deployment (e.g. your-project-abc123.vercel.app). Share this URL with your team for review.
Merge when ready
Once the preview looks correct, merge to your main branch. The next production publish picks up the changes.
laioutrrc.json and data configuration as production. They are ideal for reviewing code and design changes, but they do not let you point at a different commerce backend or staging API.Workaround: preview content with the rule engine
Sometimes you need to preview content changes on the live production site without exposing them to all visitors. The rule engine can help here. You can create rules that show specific content only when a secret URL parameter is present.
For example, you could configure a rule that displays a draft campaign banner only when ?preview=your-secret-token is appended to the URL. This way, your team can review upcoming content on the production deployment by sharing links with the query parameter, while regular visitors see the current version.
What is coming
Full multi-environment support is being built out. The goal is to let you configure environment-specific data connections, so a staging environment could point at a staging commerce backend while production points at the live one.
This will enable workflows like:
- Staging environment with its own domain, connected to your commerce platform's sandbox API.
- Environment-specific Orchestr configurations, so queries resolve against the correct backend per environment.
- Promotion pipeline from staging to production with confidence that what you tested is what goes live.
Summary
| Capability | Status | How |
|---|---|---|
| Production deployments | Available | Laioutr Cloud + hosting adapters |
| Branch preview deployments | Available | Vercel adapter |
| Preview content on production | Workaround | Rule engine with secret URL parameter |
| Environment-specific data configs | Coming soon | Planned multi-environment support |
For most teams, the combination of Vercel preview deployments for code changes and rule-engine-based content previews covers the majority of staging needs today.