Cutting to the chase: if you’re on a Business or Enterprise team on Netlify, you can click a build to make it run next in a queue. For example, if you have a really time-sensitive thing (e.g. a bug fix going to production), it can jump ahead of some random development branch building. Now I’ll elaborate.

Part of the rocketjuice of Netlify is that it runs your builds for you. Say you have a Jekyll site. The build command is probably jekyll build. You tell Netlify that’s the command you want it to run, and if successful, deploy it.

That build command is totally up to you. It could be npm run build and that calls the build command in your package.json which kicks off your custom scripts. Plus, with build plugins, you have a ton of control over the process (e.g. I got it to run Sass easily). That’s CI/CD!

Assuming you are linking up a Git repo, it’s not just pushing to your main branch where these builds runs — it’s on any branch. That’s great for a bunch of reasons. For one, your build is probably running tests too, so it’s keeping you honest. For another, Netlify gives each push a permalink to a deployed version of that exact set of code. That’s tremendously useful. It’s like staging on steroids. Anybody who needs it can get a preview of the site.

On certain projects, you might have a whole team of developers working on a bunch of branches, committing code, and running builds. So Netlify might be awful busy doing all that work. Your build might get stuck behind other people’s stuff. Maybe it absolutely doesn’t matter. Or maybe you have an important meeting in 2 minutes and you really need this deploy preview for everyone to see.

Now if you’re on a team (on a Business or Enterprise account), you can choose to hop the queue and have yours run next. People will be able to see it was you who did it so, ya know, ya gotta have a little courtesy.