Show deployments in the pull request pane with a one-click preview link

[vitalyiegorov]

When a provider like Vercel deploys a preview for a pull request, the link ends up buried in the PR pane: it flows through the commit statuses into the Checks section as a generic row, and its "Details" button looks exactly like every lint and test check. Opening the deployed preview — usually the thing you actually want mid-review — takes hunting through check rows.

Proposal

• Read GitHub's native Deployments API for the PR's head commit server-side (environment name, state, environmentUrl), keeping the latest deployment per environment.
• Add an optional deployments field to the pull request detail contract, following the existing pattern for host-conditional fields (absent means "not supported / could not ask", not "deploys nowhere").
• The Summary tab gets a Deployments section patterned on Checks: one row per environment with a status label (Live / Deploying / Failed / Inactive); the row opens the environment URL.
• The pane header gets a compact globe button — Open preview — for the newest successful deployment, so the preview is one click away.

Smallest useful scope

• GitHub provider only; GitLab / Bitbucket / Azure DevOps leave the field absent.
• Web and desktop PR pane; mobile untouched (it has no PR pane today).
• Rides the existing detail query and refresh — no new RPC, no extra polling. The deployments read goes through the existing GitHub GraphQL budget and degrades to absent on failure, so it can never break the detail view.
• No new settings.

Before / after

Before — the Vercel preview is two generic "Passed" rows inside Checks:

After — a Deployments section names the environment and its state:

And the header gains a one-click "Open preview" globe button:

(Screenshots are from a working prototype running against a real PR — t3-oss/create-t3-app#2243 with a live Vercel preview. Implementation is contracts + server + web, ~600 lines including tests; happy to open a PR if this is welcome.)

Related

• [Feature]: Add a stacked pull requests view to the PR panel #6995 — stacked pull requests view in the PR panel: same surface, different metadata.
• Today the preview URL already reaches the pane via statusCheckRollup.targetUrl as a generic check "Details" link; this proposal only promotes deployments to a first-class, clearly-labeled affordance.

[vitalyiegorov]

Update: the prototype now supports multiple preview environments.

• One live environment: the header globe button opens it directly, one click.
• Several live environments: the same button opens a menu naming each environment, newest first.

(Real data: vercel/commerce#1535, which deploys two Vercel environments per commit. Verified end-to-end — clicking a menu entry opens that environment's URL, and the single-environment case still opens its live preview directly.)

Also hardened after a review pass: the deployments read uses the API's full page window so a heavily-redeployed environment can't crowd others out, a live deployment with no address no longer falls back to opening its build log from a button that says "Open preview" (the log fallback now applies only to non-successful deployments, where logs are what you want), and the whole read remains one budgeted GraphQL call that degrades silently rather than ever failing the PR detail view.

[t3dotgg]

Note

🤖 GPT-6.1 Terra [1m] responding on behalf of Theo

Closing in line with the earlier maintainer decision on deployment previews. Supporting the provider authentication and deployment APIs for this workflow is outside the accepted scope. #8261 comment