Last year, we launched Deploy Previews, which work by deploying every pull request from your Git repository to a unique URL. You and your team can see what changes look like in production, without deploying them to your site, as if you had infinite staging environments. Since launch, our community has generated half a million Deploy Previews on Netlify.

Today we’re making the Deploy Preview feature much more useful for the open source community. When you link a public repository to your site on Netlify, we’ll make the deploy logs publicly visible by default. This way, your contributors won’t need to be collaborators on Netlify to see how their Deploy Previews build. For example, if an outside contributor opens a Pull Request on your open source project and their build fails, they can now reference the log to find out why.

If you want to keep your deploy logs private, you can change this behavior in your site's Build & deploy settings.

See this feature in action in some of the most well-known open source projects on Netlify, like Docker, React, and Kubernetes.

Give us a shout on Twitter, Gitter, or through support to let us know your thoughts on this feature, or share ideas for how we can improve it. In the meantime, we’ll keep building.