Hiya @confusus.
Have you seen this article on the topic? [Support Guide] Testing your Netlify builds
It describes several options for testing, but my preferred alternative to what you are doing is:
- lock deploys so we don’t autopublish new commits
- send deploy notifications to your CI server (maybe gitlab?) with every deploy
- potentially filter those notifications at the CI server (or via zapier, who could for instance choose NOT to forward builds for deploy-previews since you don’t need to e2e test MR’s)
- have it kick off tests which can take as long as you like
- if successful, you can via API publish an existing deploy and re-lock; something like these two calls:
Hopefully that helps!