Seeing it running

Reading evidence is half of a verdict. The other half is trying the thing. DoneMark never hosts your app; it reads the copy your own host already builds, and puts it where you judge.

A copy of this build

On Vercel (the host recommended for a Next.js app), every pull request already gets a preview deployment. DoneMark finds the one built from the attempt's own commit and puts it on the run page: A copy of this build is running — Open it ↗. If Vercel protects its previews, the page says A copy is running — Vercel asks for a sign-in, and you can give DoneMark's workflow the bypass secret so it can open it too.

A phone app from the Expo template gets a preview you open on your phone: Try it on your phone, with a code to scan. The code only opens inside a development build of the app already on your phone — DoneMark doesn't make one, so if you don't have it, ask whoever builds the app for an install link. A phone app's release never offers the web's ways to try it.

While you try it from that preview, an app from the phone template (version 50 and later) shows a thin DoneMark strip at the bottom of every screen, listing what went wrong in words: script errors, a screen that could not be drawn, and the app's server answering with an error. An error that would close the app shows its words on a screen of its own instead, with Restart. Share for my look opens your phone's share sheet so you can copy the lines into your look. The strip only appears in DoneMark's previews — a store build never shows it — and nothing is sent from the phone to DoneMark yet. An older phone app is offered Draft one to get the strip.

Choose where the project runs under How does it go live? → Where it runs: Vercel, Fly.io, Render, a server of your own, or Not yet. Until one is chosen, the release step fails on purpose rather than guess.

The database warning

A preview that writes to your live database is a trap: trying the feature changes real data. DoneMark compares a fingerprint of the database the copy uses with the live app's — never the address, never a password — and says which it is:

• Its database is not the live app's: their fingerprints differ.
• This copy talks to the live database. Anything you do in it changes real data — give the host's previews a staging database.

Journeys

A line of done when can be seen by a journey: a person's path through the running app — sign up, then sign in; search, then open — walked by your CI on the attempt's own running copy, every step photographed and the walk recorded.

The agent is told which lines are to be seen in a journey and writes the journey as a file in your repository. DoneMark never walks it: your CI does, after the push, and DoneMark reads what it walked. On the run page each journey reads ✓ walked to the end · 0:14, or Stopped at step 3 with the step's picture, and ▶ Play the recording on GitHub (GitHub keeps it 90 days). A journey walked on a copy of a different commit counts for nothing here, and says so.

Journeys are offered only when the project runs on Vercel, because they need a running copy of each attempt to walk.