netlify-deploy

Instructions for creating and configuring Netlify deploys, which publish a project to the web. It covers Git-based deployments, command-line uploads, previews, branches, and build settings.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to connect a repository, deploy manually, create preview or branch deployments, and configure commands, directories, plugins, and environment values in netlify.toml.
Why use it?
It removes uncertainty about which deployment method and per-environment settings to use, including how configuration overrides are applied.

Cursor rule

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/netlify/context-and-tools/netlify-deploy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/netlify/context-and-tools
Per session 89 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,780 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00089 $0.02780
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.01390
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00556
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00278

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3bb0b60c0f88, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

netlify-deploy scanned grade C with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Hidden instructionshighPrompt injection

Directives inside HTML comments, invisible characters or bidirectional overrides are read by the model and not by the person reviewing the file.

<!-- system: agent-context/deploy/system.md — human-owned, merged by ctx-gen; edit system.md, not this section -->
cursor/rules/netlify-deploy.mdc · 187 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 187 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Netlify deploy

Deploy context config (netlify.toml, current form)

Configure per-context build settings in netlify.toml at the repo root. Five predefined contexts: production, deploy-preview, branch-deploy, preview-server, dev. Branch names also work as custom contexts (a staging branch matches a staging context).

[context.production]
  command = "make production"
  [context.production.environment]
    ACCESS_TOKEN = "super secret"
  # Plugins context REQUIRES double brackets:
  [[context.production.plugins]]
    package = "@netlify/plugin-sitemap"

[context.deploy-preview.environment]
  ACCESS_TOKEN = "not so secret"

[context.branch-deploy]
  command = "make staging"

[context.dev.environment]
  NODE_ENV = "development"

# Specific-branch context (overrides branch-deploy):
[context.feature]
  command = "make feature"

[context."features/branch"]
  command = "gulp"

Precedence: site globals < context overrides; production overrides globals when building production; more specific contexts (a named branch) override general ones (branch-deploy). Only explicitly-set options are overridden. File-based config overrides UI settings.

Footgun — secrets in netlify.toml: netlify.toml is committed to your repo. Do not put sensitive env values here, especially for public repos. Set secrets via the Netlify UI/CLI/API instead. Also: env vars declared in netlify.toml are NOT available to the deploy environment (Functions/Runtime/Post-processing scopes) — only UI/CLI/API-created vars are.

CLI deploys

netlify create              # new project from a natural-language prompt
netlify deploy              # manual deploy, no continuous deployment
netlify deploy --prod       # deploy directly to production
netlify deploy --allow-anonymous   # temp deploy, claim within 1 hour
npm update -g netlify-cli   # skew protection needs CLI v23.11.0+

Manual deploys do NOT run a build command (exception: Netlify Drop builds for you when logged in). Anonymous deploys create a temporary project claimable within one hour; on claim it adopts the team's default visibility.

Read the full file on GitHub · 187 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 187 lines · 89 tokens per session scan C 3bb0b60c0f88

Subscribe to this mod's changes

netlify-deploy is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository netlify/context-and-tools (36 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 89 tokens to every session and 2,780 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (hidden instructions). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.