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Hosting and deployment

How to deploy Sanity Studio, either on your own or using our hosted service.

Sanity Studio is a React web application you use to manage content on the Sanity platform. We can host this web application for you, giving you a nice my-company.sanity.studio URL.

Since the Studio runs in the browser and communicates with the Content Lake APIs it's also possible to host it on your favorite hosting service. You can even deploy multiple Studios for the same project! This is useful for managing separate environments like testing and staging, or if you have multiple publications or markets you manage with separate datasets.

Hosting with Sanity

# With the CLI globally installed
sanity deploy

# Using npx
npx sanity deploy

Running this command from your Studio project folder builds and deploys your Studio, making it available on a *.sanity.studio URL. When you first deploy you are asked to choose a unique hostname for your Studio.

Gotcha

The sanity deploy command works by building the source files in your studio project to static files, which is then uploaded and served from your chosen sanity.studio domain.

Note that there's no authentication involved when serving the built source files, so make sure to not include any sensitive data in your studio code (schema files, package.json, config files, custom inputs, etc).

Undeploying the Studio

# With the CLI globally installed
sanity undeploy

# Using npx
npx sanity undeploy

Run the command above to change the hostname later or remove the Studio from the web. The next time you deploy you may choose a new hostname. Hosting with Sanity is currently limited to 1 Studio per project.

Self-hosting the Studio

Since the Studio consists of static HTML, CSS, and Javascript files and communicates with Sanity through our HTTP API, it can be hosted anywhere. Popular hosting services like Vercel and Netlify make it possible to automatically deploy new versions of your Studio when you push it to code repositories like GitHub.

There are two things you need to make sure of when hosting the Studio yourself or with a service:

  1. The server that delivers the Sanity Studio files needs to be configured for single-page application routing. This means if the requested URL path doesn't exist on the filesystem, it should serve index.html to allow the frontend router to handle the request. Most hosting services will have configuration options for this.
  2. The domain where the Studio is hosted must be added as a valid domain in the project's CORS settings. For security, the Sanity API ensures that only approved Studios are allowed to communicate with your project. This is in addition to other security measures such as user authentication, private datasets, and custom access rules.

If you host with Sanity, this is automatically handled for you. If your host does not support single-page-application routing, you can add a redirect rule to make sure non-existent paths are redirected properly. Check the documentation for your provider or server software.

Specifying the base path

Normally the Studio expects to be hosted at the root level of its hostname; for instance https://studio.example.com/. To serve the studio on a subpath, such as https://example.com/studio, you need to edit the CLI configuration file. You'll find it as sanity.cli.js or sanity.cli.ts in the root of your Studio project.

import {defineCliConfig} from 'sanity/cli'

export default defineCliConfig({
  project: {
    basePath: '/studio'
  },
  // ...config continued
})

The Studio can now be served from https://example.com/studio. This will also change the base path of static files.

Most cases where you embed the Studio in another application will require you to set the basePath.

Gotcha

The sanity.config.js file also has a basePath property - this defines the base path of the workspace and not the actual studio.

In other words, the two basePaths gets joined together: if the CLI base path is set to /studio and the workspace base path is /production, the resulting base path for the "production" workspace will be /studio/production.

Setting the SANITY_STUDIO_BASEPATH environment variable is an alternative method of defining the base path for the studio, and will override any value set in the configuration file.

Building the Studio for hosting

# With the CLI installed globally
sanity build

# With npx
npx sanity build

# With npx, specifying the build folder name to be "public"
npx sanity build public

Run the command above from the studio folder to generate the files for hosting. This will output the files to the dist/ directory by default. Sometimes your environment requires another directory name, for instance public. You can specify this by entering the desired name after the build command.

Once the build is complete, the directory can be uploaded and hosted from any web hosting where you can control redirects for a Single-Page Application, like Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare.

Hosting with Sanity in a CI/CD flow

You can host with Sanity automatically with continuous integration tools. This is convenient for automatically updating the hosted Studio when you push your local changes to source repositories or do manual releases. Add @sanity/cli as a development dependency and configure your CI/CD workflow to run the command sanity deploy. Remember to have the sanity.cli.js config file in your Studio folder.

You also need to provide an authorization token using the SANITY_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable. This is because deploying with sanity deploy uses your local user session for authenticating with our hosting service, which won't necessarily be available in your CI/CD workflows. You can create a deploy token in the project management dashboard.

Environment variables

Sometimes you want to configure the projectId or dataset specified in sanity.cli.js and sanity.config.js at build time. This is useful for building multiple Studios from the same schema and code to facilitate different environments. See the documentation on environment variables for your options.

GraphQL

How to deploy the GraphQL APIs is covered in its own section.

Configuring the Studio's URL in the Project dashboard

To change the displayed studio URL on sanity.io/manage you can add a custom studio URL in your project settings under Settings.

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