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Preview access and aliases

R-PREVIEW-1 - Preview deployments are access-controlled or public-safe

Rule. Pages or Workers previews that expose non-public product behavior, tenant data, admin flows, or privileged APIs must be disabled or protected by Cloudflare Access, application auth, or an equivalent access layer.

Why. Preview deployments can be created for branches and pull requests. Public preview URLs are useful for review, but they are still deployed application surfaces.

vcqa. Flag public previews that expose tenant data, admin actions, auth-sensitive flows, or production-like integrations without a documented public-safe decision.

References.

R-PREVIEW-2 - Preview data cannot mutate production tenant state

Rule. Pull request previews and aliased previews must not write to production data resources, production tenant integrations, production queues, or production webhooks unless a documented and reviewed exception exists.

Why. Preview code is usually less reviewed than production code and often runs before release gates.

vcqa. Flag preview bindings, secrets, URLs, or CI variables that point to production tenant state.

References.

R-ALIAS-1 - Deployment aliases are protected surfaces

Rule. Custom preview aliases, tenant staging aliases, and custom domains must have documented authentication, authorization, cache, indexing, and DNS ownership posture.

Why. Stable aliases are easier to discover and remember than hash URLs, so they need the same security and privacy review as the deployment they point at.

vcqa. Flag aliases that are not listed in a tenant manifest or that lack access, indexing, DNS, and cache ownership.

References.

R-INDEX-1 - Public previews are intentionally noindexed or disabled

Rule. Public preview surfaces must be intentionally noindexed or disabled when they contain customer-specific, non-public, or security-sensitive product behavior.

Why. Search indexing can turn temporary previews into durable public discovery surfaces.

vcqa. Flag public previews with no documented indexing posture, especially when the preview is tenant-specific or contains non-public workflows.

References.