Why Docs Teams Need Live Previews

Technical documentation is a collaborative product. Writers constantly loop in product managers, engineers, and other writers to review structural changes and new content before anything goes live. Getting that feedback in context — with the navigation reordered, or a whole section rewritten — makes a far bigger difference than reviewing bare Markdown files.

The standard workflow is to run a development server locally. The problem has always been sharing that local view with people who aren’t at your machine. Screenshots lose fidelity, screen recordings go stale, and asking stakeholders to clone a branch and boot their own dev server is a heavy ask for a quick review. Cloudflare’s docs team found a better answer in one of their own products: Cloudflare Tunnel.

Exposing a Local Server Without Opening Ports

Cloudflare Tunnel creates an outbound-only connection from your machine to the Cloudflare edge. No firewall holes, no public IP exposure — just a secure bridge between a local service and a public URL. For the docs team, that means stakeholders can interact with an unpublished version of the site exactly as if it were live.

The setup for a single writer looks like this:

  1. Create a local branch of the cloudflare-docs repo, make changes, and run the development server on port 8000.
  2. Log in to the Cloudflare account with cloudflared, select the zone (in this case developers.cloudflare.com), and authorize Tunnel for that zone.
  3. Create a named tunnel.
  4. Assign a readable DNS record, such as [writer].developers.cloudflare.com.
  5. Point the tunnel at the local port via a config file.
  6. Run the tunnel to establish the edge connection.

Once running, the tunnel serves traffic from localhost:8000 to the assigned subdomain. Anyone with the URL sees exactly what the writer sees locally — including that “About this section is still in draft” note you may not want in a pull request yet.

Locking Down the Preview

An open preview URL is fine for a throwaway demo, but not for internal work on unreleased features. The docs team wrapped the tunnel in a Cloudflare Access self-hosted application. Access sits in front of the subdomain and enforces a policy that restricts entry to specific user groups, requiring authentication via Google or one-time PIN (OTP).

This keeps the tunnel shareable with colleagues while blocking anyone else from stumbling onto a draft of unannounced documentation. For teams already on the Cloudflare stack, this is a minimal additional configuration step.

Each writer now runs their own named tunnel and dedicated DNS record, exposing their local environment to the edge on demand. When the review cycle is over, the tunnel shuts down and the URL goes dark.

What’s Still on the Roadmap

Live previews eliminate the “look at my screen” problem, but the feedback loop isn’t finished. The team is exploring ways to capture feedback inline at the shared URL, rather than routing comments through chat or email afterward. They’re also evaluating Cloudflare Pages to speed up the deployment pipeline for these review environments.