Can you trust branches in Umbraco Cloud?

Questions
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1

Hi everyone :waving_hand:

I heard a rumor from colleague who attended Umbraco Cloud training some years ago that you can’t fully trust branches in Umbraco Cloud.

Can anyone confirm or deny this rumor?

I haven’t run into any problems myself yet, but I’d like to understand the limitations better before relying on branches in a larger project setup.

Thanks in advance :folded_hands:

2

Can you elaborate on why you might not be able to trust them, please?

3

Sure – what I’ve heard (and what I’m trying to confirm) is that branches in Umbraco Cloud may not be completely isolated. There have been cases where changes made in a branch were unexpectedly merged into the main environment — or at least that’s the concern.

4

Oh, that is concerning.

5

Hi Lasse and Simon :waving_hand:

Thanks for raising this — it’s a great question and an important topic to clarify.

To address the core concern: yes, environments on Umbraco Cloud are fully isolated, so you shouldn’t see changes in one environment unexpectedly affecting another. That would indeed be very worrying, but I can confidently say that this is not how the platform is designed to operate.

That said, using Git branches directly in Umbraco Cloud is not recommended practice, even though it may seem natural due to Git being the underlying version control system. The Git repository on Umbraco Cloud acts primarily as a deployment mechanism tied to App Services. So while branching technically works, it can behave unexpectedly in some scenarios.

Here’s why:

  • The Cloud Git repo is considered ephemeral. If your plan changes (e.g., due to scaling or resource constraints), Umbraco Cloud may spin up a new App Service — and in the process, any non-deployed branches can be lost, as the repository is reset from the active deployment source.

  • Also, Umbraco Cloud will never auto-merge branches into the main deployment (e.g., master) — that kind of change always requires explicit manual action.

The best practice is to keep your main source of truth in your preferred external Git repository (like GitHub, GitLab, Azure Repos, etc.) and use Umbraco Cloud’s CI/CD features to deploy changes. This ensures both version control robustness and predictable deployments.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: You can read more about this in our documentation

If CI /CD is not your cup of tea then there’s also a Skift article setting up bi-directional deployments with Gitlab (Link)

Kind regards

Martin Humlund Clausen

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6

Thank you for this answer @mclausen, that was very informative :sun: H5YR

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