Turn off autopublishing ONLY for production branch

This is for https://musing-murdock-7c2101.netlify.app/

We’d like to have manual control over the publishing of our production site. Essentially we need to “Lock to stop auto publishing” but ONLY for our production branch. We’d like all branch deploys to continue auto publishing.

If it means having to manually build the production site then that’s fine too.

Is this possible? Thanks!

@ExperienceNow Have you read the applicable documentation for Manage deploys, specifically the Locked deploys section?

@nathanmartin Yes, I’ve tried the “Lock to stop auto publishing”. The problem is that it also turns off our branch deploys.

Is there a way to continue autodeploying all branches EXCEPT the production branch?

@ExperienceNow I’m not actually sure, it’s not a feature that I use personally.

I’d presumed it only locked the main branch due to the statement:

New deploys won’t be published to the main site

But “main site” might just be a throwaway term there.

If the Lock to stop auto publishing does prevent all builds for that site instance being deployed (even the branch deploys), the only thing I can think of would be to set up another site instance in Netlify for performing the branch deploys.

That way you could lock the main site instance, but leave the branch one unlocked, and you could proxy between them with redirects if necessary.

I think unfortunately “main site” is a throwaway. I submitted changes to some non-master branches and it built but did not deploy them.

I’ll look into setting up a new site. It’s unfortunate that that is the only option though. Seems like we should be able to turn autodeploy on/off per-branch.

@ExperienceNow I can’t say for certain it’s the only option, it’s just an option that I can think of “off the top of my head”, and I’m not an expert on every feature that Netlify has, since I only use a subset personally.

You can make Feature Requests using the Features section of the forum.

Thanks for the help @nathanmartin

I think what we might end up doing is just restrict pushes to master to a few people and then have everyone who wants to deploy features to live merge into a “nextRelease” branch. Then we can choose to merge the “nextRelease” branch to master whenever we’d like to deploy.