Previewing Your Site Before You Publish, Without a Staging Server
What actually happens when you click preview in Knowledge — a short-lived signed session, not a full staging environment you have to manage.
"Preview before publish" is a baseline expectation for any documentation tool — nobody wants to find a typo after a page is already public. What's less commonly explained is what preview actually does under the hood, and it's worth knowing because it's a real, specific mechanism rather than a generic feature description.
What clicking preview actually does
Preview works by minting a short-lived preview session — a signed, temporary token stored server-side and handed to a sibling application specifically built to render it: apps/knowledge-preview. Rather than deploying your unpublished changes to a separate staging server you'd have to provision and maintain, the preview session carries enough signed state for the preview app to render exactly what you'd see if you published right now, without your draft content ever actually going live.
Why this needs less permission than editing
Starting a preview session only requires read capability on the space, not manage. That's a deliberate, sensible scoping: previewing is looking at your own space's site as it would appear, which is a read action even though it's showing you unpublished content — you're not changing anything by looking at it. Anyone with read access to a space can preview it; you don't need edit or publish rights just to see what a draft would look like live.
Why this matters if you're used to a heavier staging setup
Traditional "staging environment" workflows require standing up and maintaining a parallel deployment, keeping it in sync, and remembering it exists. A signed preview session sidesteps all of that — there's no separate environment to provision, nothing to keep in sync, and no stale staging deploy to worry about, because the preview session is generated fresh from your actual current draft state every time.
Using it
Request a preview before publishing any change you're not fully certain about — since it only needs read access and there's no environment to set up, there's no real reason not to check. The session is short-lived by design, so if you preview something and come back to it later expecting the same link to still work, generate a fresh preview rather than assuming an old one is still valid.