Help with deployment_url for Playwright tests

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1

Hello,

I would like to ask for some help understanding why the deployment_url sometimes returns different links in GitHub Actions. Let me explain.

I’m currently using Playwright for automated tests, and I configured the tests to use the VERCEL_AUTOMATION_BYPASS_SECRET (as per these instructions), and also configured GitHub actions to check the deployment_status (as per these instructions.

When the tests are triggered in GitHub, I noticed two different patterns (printing the variable) depending on the execution:

  • deployment_url: https://<company_domain>-bcnxcs6xu-<company_domain>-com.vercel.app/ (no staging in the URL). In this case, I have no problems with the tests.

  • deployment_url: https://<company_domain>-staging-bcnxcs6xu-<company_domain>-com.vercel.app/ (contains staging in the URL). In this case, the tests fail when trying to bypass the protection, regardless if bypass secret is set. The same problem happens when I try to run the tests locally.

I would like to know if there’s a logic in which “staging” is appended to the URL. And do you have any idea or advice as to how I can always get the version without staging, where the tests work as expected?

Thank you.

2

Does the difference appear when deploying to different environments or from specific branches?

The inclusion of -staging makes me think this is related to a custom environment or branch-specific generated URL causing github.event.deployment_status.environment_url to return a different value.

3

It turns out we deploy to two different environments. And github.event.deployment_status.target_url randomly (I suppose it depends on what gets deployed first?) returns one or the other.

Screenshot 2025-03-05 at 10.54.43
Screenshot 2025-03-05 at 10.54.43877×121 14.2 KB

Would you know if there’s an easy way to pick one or exclude the other through the API’s available in github.event.deployment_status ?

4

One of our engineering managers found the solution to the problem with something along these lines
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73811903/github-actions-on-vercel-deployment-with-multiple-environments

It’s working for us at the moment.

Thanks for the help Amy!

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