Custom draft URLs for manual deploys

Yes, I understand what you want :slight_smile: As I explained, it is not likely to happen, since unfortunately from our side it IS a major change to the existing system (which thousands of people have already automated using the existing patterns). So, let’s come up with a different plan that can work for you!

I still don’t understand why you need the link at deploy time. The best practice is to use relative URL’s, so /asset.png rather than https://deployid--sitename.netlify.com/asset.png, which would mean that the site works at any hostname. Could that work for you?

If not, things get hairier but still possible: you could create your own API client against our API (see [Support Guide] Understanding and using Netlify's API for details) to manage things using a workflow like this:

  1. you’d do a build using placeholders for the URL,
  2. you’d post to our post to our “create deploy” endpoint, which returns the deploy ID,
  3. …and be able to modify your files to use it…
  4. before uploading them.

That’s not something we can give a lot of tech support on, so I’d encourage you to keep looking for a way NOT to need that URL which I look at as antipattern - it’s only really useful/intended for sharing or testing after deploying and shouldn’t be referenced internally within the deploy, in my experience.