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Deployments

A deployment on Argos is a static build—most commonly a Storybook—served on a unique URL that you can open, share, and review. Every time you run the Argos CLI, Argos uploads your build, generates a URL, and posts the status back to your pull request.

Use deployments to:

  • Preview a Storybook for every pull request, with no infrastructure of your own to maintain.
  • Share a live link with designers, product, or stakeholders to review work in context.
  • Browse the history of every deployed build across branches and commits.

Deployments list in the Argos dashboard Deployments list in the Argos dashboard.

How it works​

A deployment is created in three phases:

  1. Build — The Argos CLI scans your local directory and computes a content hash for every file.
  2. Upload — Argos returns pre-signed upload URLs for the files it doesn't already have. Files that match an existing hash are skipped, so re-deploying an unchanged build is near-instant.
  3. Serve — Once the upload finishes, Argos finalizes the deployment, assigns it a URL, and reports the status to your Git provider.

Each deployment is immutable. Re-running the deploy command always produces a new deployment with its own URL—the previous one keeps working.

Quickstart​

The following steps get a Storybook deployed in under a minute. The same flow works for any static directory (Vite build, Next.js export, plain HTML, etc.).

1. Install the Argos CLI​

npm exec -- npm install --save-dev @argos-ci/cli

2. Build your static site​

Generate the directory you want to deploy. For Storybook:

npm run build-storybook

This produces a storybook-static/ directory.

3. Deploy​

npm exec -- argos deploy ./storybook-static

The CLI uploads your build and prints a unique URL when the deployment is ready:

✔ Deployed: https://my-project-abcd123-acme.argos-ci.live

By default, the deployment is created in the preview environment. To deploy to production, add the --prod flag:

npm exec -- argos deploy ./storybook-static --prod

See Environments for the rules that decide which environment a deployment lands in.

Authentication​

The deploy command uses the same authentication as the rest of the Argos CLI. Set the ARGOS_TOKEN environment variable in CI:

ARGOS_TOKEN=<your-project-token>

You can find the project token in Settings → General → Token. On GitHub Actions, you can also use OIDC or tokenless authentication to avoid managing a secret.

What's next​

  • Environments — How preview and production deployments are determined, and how to customize the production branch.
  • URLs and domains — The URLs Argos generates for each deployment, and how to set the production domain.
  • Access protection — Restrict who can open deployment URLs.
  • Use in CI — Deploy automatically on every pull request with GitHub Actions.