Preview tokens that expire on their own

Sometimes a draft needs eyes outside the dashboard: a client, a lawyer, a colleague on their phone. Publishing it early is not an option, and a password protected staging site is one more thing to run. ATLAS uses preview tokens instead.

What a preview token is

• A token of kind preview that always expires. Any member may create one for 1 to 120 minutes.
• It sees the latest draft of every entry, not only what is live.
• Its responses are never cached and the page is marked noindex, so a draft cannot leak into a CDN or a search engine.
• When the time is up it simply stops working. There is nothing to revoke.

Create one

Any member of the brand may create a preview token, editors included, because it shows drafts but changes nothing:

POST /v1/manage/api-tokens
{ "name": "Client review", "kind": "preview", "expires_in_minutes": 30 }

Other token kinds, such as the read token a site uses in production, stay admin only.

Open the draft on the real site

Sites built on @atlas/nuxt ship a preview route. It stores the token in an httpOnly cookie, so the reviewer browses the real site, with the real theme, and sees the draft wherever it appears.