Preview Token 🚀

Preview Token 🚀

When working on content, you often want to see how it looks before publishing.
That’s where Content Island’s Preview Token comes in handy.

⚡ TL;DR

To preview unpublished content in your local or staging environment, just add the prefix PREVIEW_ to your access token.
That’s it.

🔍 Preview Token in action

Let’s say you have a blog project with several posts already published.
Now you’re drafting a new post and want to check how it will look on your site before hitting publish.

Lista de posts con un post en status Draft

In your project (Astro, Next, or whichever framework you use), open your environment variables file and find the Content Island API Token.
Then simply add the prefix PREVIEW_.

.env

- CONTENT_ISLAND_ACCESS_TOKEN=55e5a31cc5573948d5c08b9902fd135d
+ CONTENT_ISLAND_ACCESS_TOKEN=PREVIEW_55e5a31cc5573948d5c08b9902fd135d

Restart your project, and you’ll now see both published posts and those still in draft. 🎉

Lista de posts con un post en status Published y otro en Draft

If you want to try it yourself:

  • You can directly modify the token in this StackBlitz sandbox (once you add PREVIEW_ to the API token in .env, scroll through the post list and you’ll see the new one).

  • You can also download it and run it locally: example posts repository

⚠️ Important.

When working with unpublished content:

  • Some fields may be incomplete.
  • Certain validations might fail.
  • Errors can occur if the content is still being worked on.

✅ Conclusions

The Preview Token gives you a simple and safe way to preview draft content in development or staging, without ever touching your production environment.