Do Forms & Functions not show/work until site is "published"?

Support
1

I have a site which is being launched in a phased approach. Phase 1 teaser, phase 2 signup form.

I have auto publishing off because I don’t want builds to go “live” until the right day/time. I was hoping to be able to check the functionality of the Netlify Functions and Forms on the preview links that still happen when I do a deploy (and not a publish), but they don’t seem to register (I do see in the deploy that the functions at least are “seen”, though the new ones are not shown in the UI).

If I make a whole new “site” on Netlify and deploy & publish the same git repo, the functions and forms work.

I’m happy to share links (and passwords to access for testing if necessary) if you can make this thread private or PM me for this info. I can’t share the links publicly.

Can I be sure that when it comes time to publish the Phase 2 of the site, that the Forms and Functions will also be published and will function? Is the test of deploying and publishing a whole new site with the same code base (and verified that they all work on that separate site) a sufficient litmus test? I may have people on the site when Phase 2 launches trying to submit the form and need to be confident that it will function as expected.

4

Hey there,
If you make a new site, and deploy from the same repo, that’s one great way to test your forms and functions functionality, assuming that any environment variables needed are also transferred between your “test” site and the production site you ultimately want to publish.

In general, functions deployed to branches or on Deploy Previews should still be available for you to test and view in the Functions tab of your site. You do have to use the search bar to enter the branch name or Deploy Preview number- otherwise they don’t show up on the page by default!

Forms are different though. Regardless of which branch you deploy a form to, if our build system picked it up, it will end up in the Forms tab. There is no separation by branch within that view. This also means that if you deploy a form with the same name to a staging branch and a production branch, but change the form fields only on one branch, you will change the only form in the Form tab.

Some of this is obviously not intuitive, so I’m leaving notes for others to see in case they run into this :slight_smile: But I also noticed that you’re a Pro customer, so we can move the rest of the conversation to our helpdesk, get your specific site info, and go from there.