What is a Testing Domain?

A Testing Domain is a free .cloudvent.net URL that CloudCannon assigns to every Site. Each Testing Domain uses a randomly generated adjective and noun separated by a hyphen (e.g., grey-grouse.cloudvent.net or brave-submarine.cloudvent.net).

Testing Domains are useful for seeing your content live after a successful Site build. If you use a publishing workflow, each Site in the workflow has its own Testing Domain, so you can see the content of each branch. For more information, please read our documentation on setting up a staging workflow.

You can view your Testing Domain any time after your first successful Site build.

You can use your CloudCannon Testing Domain as your primary domain; however, we don't recommend doing this for two reasons.

One, you cannot change the automatically generated domain name without creating a new Site on CloudCannon. The automatically generated domain may not be right for you or your Site. You can generate a new one by creating a new Site with the same files, but this can be inefficient.

Two, by default, CloudCannon automatically de-indexes Testing Domains so that they do not appear in search engines. CloudCannon does this by serving the following robots.txt file on all Testing Domains, even if your Site has its own robots.txt file, and by adding an X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow header to every page.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
noindex: /

On a Custom Domain, CloudCannon serves your Site's own robots.txt file, or a default file if your Site doesn't have one. For more information, please read our documentation on what a Custom Domain is.

Custom Testing Domains#

A Custom Testing Domain lets you choose the domain name for your .cloudvent.net URL. Choosing your Testing Domain improves your branding if you are sharing the URL outside of your Organization (e.g., sending a test Site to a client).

For access to this feature, please contact our friendly support team. We'll set you up with a unique handle for your Organization. This handle will become the suffix for all Testing Domains (e.g., prefix-company-name.cloudvent.net⁠).

Whenever you create a new Site, the Create a Site page will ask you to enter a unique prefix in the Custom Testing Domain Prefix field, which is prepended to your Organization's suffix.

Take care when adding a Custom Testing Domain to a new Site. Each full domain can only be used once, so you can't reuse that combination of prefix and suffix.