LocalTesting.adoc

Testing netlify deployments locally

1. Introduction

2. The Netlify CLI

   1. Installation

   2. Further Reading

Introduction

While you can test your Netlify deployments by pushing to a branch and then deploying that branch to a preview URL, it’s often useful to test your builds locally before pushing to a remote branch. This can save you the time needed for creating and pushing a commit since an update on a dev server gets deployed upon saving a file. This is especially true if you’re working on a feature branch that you don’t want to push to a remote branch until it’s ready for review. You can use the nuxt dev command to test your changes locally, but the advantage of using the netlify-cli is that it allows you to use the environment configuration from your netlify site.

The Netlify CLI

The netlify cli is a command line tool that offers a variety of netlify features. However we will only be focussing on the steps required to run the PWA locally in a netlify environment.

Installation

To install the netlify cli, run the following command in your terminal:

npm install netlify-cli -g

Next you need to login to netlify using the cli.

netlify login

This will open a browser window where you can login to netlify.

Next you will have to link your site to the netlify cli. You can do that by running the following command:

netlify link

Finally to run your site locally in a netlify environment, run the following command:

netlify dev

This will run the PWA template locally using the environment variables from the linked netlify site. This will allow you to store and share your environment variables across your team using the netlify web interface and create consistent development environments.

Further Reading

You can find more information about the netlify cli here: https://docs.netlify.com/cli/get-started/