PR Preview: update to exclude pr-previews folder on deploy to GH pages

[itsmedavep]

@billhimmelsbach @contolini @anselmbradford

Looking into why the PR preview GH action links work for a while then 404 I think I found the culprit. I do not believe it to be an issue with the PR preview action but a repo GH actions setup issue.

Essentially, the repo has competing GH actions that perform differing tasks. Those being build-and-deploy.yml and pr-preview.yml.

Build and deploy triggers after every push to main and builds the website and deploys it to gh-pages branch. PR preview builds the changes on a PR and then pushes that to a folder on the gh-pages branch after every PR event (it also will remove the preview on close of PR).

The crux of it is that build-and-deploy in the deploy step overwrites the entire gh-pages branch. That GH action triggers on every push to main. Following that logic the solution becomes, don't overwrite the pr-preview folder on the branch (gh-pages) we are deploying to.

Changes

• Update build-and-deploy.yml step Deploy 🚀 to clean-exclude: pr-previews
  https://github.com/JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action/tree/v4/
  👇

clean-exclude	If you need to use clean but you'd like to preserve certain files or folders you can use this option. This should contain each pattern as a single line in a multiline string.	with	No

How to test this PR

1. It's hard to test this end 2 end without committing to mainline code and then triggering the actions. Suffice it to say, the fix seems very non invasive so IMO worth giving a shot.

Screenshots

Notes

[github-actions]

PR Preview Action v1.8.1
Preview removed because the pull request was closed.
2026-03-20 14:13 UTC

[flacoman91]

let's give it a try and revert if it doesnt work