Manual Deploy Not Reflecting on Live Site, But Auto-Publish Works

Issue

I noticed an inconsistency between manual and auto-published deploys on my site. Here’s what happened:

  1. Auto-publishing was turned off.
  2. I made code updates and triggered a manual deploy after previewing the changes in Netlify’s deploy preview. The changes were visible in the preview.
  3. After a successful manual deployment, the changes didn’t reflect on my live site.
  4. I then tried “Clear cache and deploy”, but the issue persisted.
  5. Finally, I turned auto-publishing back on, made another small code change, and pushed it. This time, the changes appeared on the live site.

Questions & Observations

  • If manual deploys are supposed to work as expected, why didn’t the changes show up until I enabled auto-publishing?
  • Does Netlify handle manual and auto-published deploys differently when it comes to caching or CDN refresh?
  • Could this be related to how Netlify prioritizes live builds when auto-publishing is off?

Hi there,

Thanks for your questions!

Even though a manual deploy updates the site, Netlify’s CDN might still serve cached assets from a previous deploy, especially if auto-publishing was turned off for an extended period. Normally, Netlify invalidates the cache upon publishing, but if something interfered with that process, old assets could still be served.

As far as I know, we do not prioritize caching differently between deploy types.

Thanks!