'Publish' button functionality is unclear and you can't publish branches separate from production

We have been using the ‘locked deploy’ flow for our site, pushing to our ‘preprod’ branch to create a preprod.oursite.com deploy, and if testing passes we ‘publish’ the deploy which makes that build available at oursite.com.

This all works great, however recently one of our team members wanted to roll back a commit on a non-production branch, and clicked ‘publish’ on a branch commit expecting that button to publish said commit onto the currently selected branch. instead it published it to production causing an outage.

Of course some of the blame here is on us, but I think one of two things need to be done to improve the ux of this feature:

  • either the publish button needs to have a selector for which branch/url you wish to publish to
  • or there should be some very clear copy that says the button will publish to production, currently there is no mention of this in the text. ideally I think the button should also be red since it is capable of breaking production if used from the wrong build.

I’ll pass the feedback to the devs.

We’re facing the exact same issue more than two years later. The copy change really can’t be that hard, given the high risk of affecting production inadvertently. Disappointed to find nothing has been done here yet.

I’ve followed up with your request in our helpdesk. Thanks for voicing your feedback here!