Hosting and deployment

Sanity Studio is an open-source React-based Single Page Application (SPA) that runs entirely in the browser and connects with Sanity's hosted APIs and Content Lake.

There are two primary ways of hosting Sanity Studio:

• We can host this web application for you, giving you a nice my-company.sanity.studio URL. With a single Sanity CLI command, you can deploy and manage multiple Studios for different environments or use cases under the same project.
• You can deploy Sanity Studio on any hosting platform that supports SPA routing.

The built-in Sanity Studio hosting is the quickest and easiest way to make the Studio accessible on the web. Self-hosting is usually preferred when you wish to use platform-specific features that are not offered by our hosting and when you want to host the Studio under your own domain.

It's also possible to embed Sanity Studio in an application as a dependency – however, depending on your setup and configuration, you might forego certain features that are tied to the build tooling that comes with the Sanity CLI.

# 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 deploy, you will be asked to choose a unique hostname for your Studio. On subsequent deploys, you can select an existing hostname in a prompt or specify it in the CLI config file (sanity.cli.js|ts) for automated deployments.

import {defineCliConfig} from 'sanity/cli'

export default defineCliConfig({
  api: {
    projectId: 'projectid',
    dataset: 'production'
  },
  // Tip: You can use an environment variable for studioHost if you want to deploy separate Studios for production, staging, testing etc.
  studioHost: 'my-company'
})

# 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. You may choose a new hostname the next time you deploy.

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.ts config file in your Studio folder.

If you need to accommodate test, staging, and production deployments, then we recommend that you define the Studio host name (and other configuration) in environment variables and access them in the config file like this:

import {defineCliConfig} from 'sanity/cli'

export default defineCliConfig({
  api: {
    projectId: process.env.SANITY_STUDIO_PROJECT_ID,
    dataset: process.env.SANITY_STUDIO_DATASET,
  },
  studioHost: process.env.SANITY_STUDIO_HOSTNAME
})

You also need to provide an authorization token using the SANITY_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable. This is because deploying with the sanity deploy command 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.

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 for 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 can 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.

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.

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.

# 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.

Sometimes you want to configure the projectId , dataset or studioHost 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.

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