How to filter Sanity documents by published status excluding drafts

The easiest way to filter out draft documents from your queries is to add a filter condition that excludes any document with an _id starting with drafts.. Here's how:

*[_type == 'yourDocType' && !(_id in path("drafts.**"))]

The !(_id in path("drafts.**")) part filters out any document whose ID matches the pattern drafts.*, which is how Sanity identifies draft documents.

Understanding how drafts work:

In Sanity's Content Lake, drafts and published documents are stored as separate entities. When you edit a published document, Sanity creates a copy with the ID prefixed by drafts. (e.g., drafts.asdf-1234). So you might have both asdf-1234 (published) and drafts.asdf-1234 (draft) in your dataset at the same time.

Alternative approach using perspectives:

Instead of manually filtering, you can also use the published perspective when querying via the API. As of the recent API version v2025-02-19, the default perspective is now published, which automatically returns only published documents. If you're still getting drafts, you might be using an older API version or explicitly setting a different perspective.

You can set the perspective in your client configuration:

const client = createClient({
  // ... other config
  perspective: 'published', // Only returns published documents
  useCdn: true
})

The published perspective is perfect for production environments where you only want live content, while previewDrafts is useful for preview environments where you want to see unpublished changes.