Cloud-based branches¶

Tinybird branches let you develop and test your project in ephemeral cloud environments without affecting your main workspace.

A branch is a copy of your workspace resources, such as Data Sources, Pipes, Endpoints, Tokens, and connections. By default, it copies the workspace structure, not the workspace data. This gives you an isolated environment where you can change schemas, queries, and APIs safely. When you need representative data for testing, you can explicitly bring in a sample or the latest production partition.

If your Tinybird project is in a Git repository, you usually don't need to create branches manually. Check out a Git branch and run tb build; Tinybird automatically creates or uses a cloud branch with the same name as your Git branch.

git checkout -b preview-1
tb build

Manually create a branch¶

You can also create a branch manually with the Tinybird CLI.

tb branch create preview-1

If you want to use production data, use the --last-partition flag to bring the last partition of production data into the branch.

tb branch create preview-1 --last-partition

Start a branch¶

After you create a branch manually, start a development session against it:

tb --branch=preview-1 dev

If you created the branch automatically with tb build, you can also run tb dev from the same Git branch:

tb dev

tb dev will watch for changes in your project and rebuild it automatically.

» Building project...
✓ datasources/user_actions.datasource created
✓ endpoints/user_actions_line_chart.pipe created
✓ Rebuild completed in 0.2s

If you stop the process with Ctrl+C, you will stop the branch.

» Received shutdown signal, stopping...
✓ Branch 'preview-1' session stopped

Make changes to your project¶

While tb --branch=preview-1 dev is running, you can edit files in your project and see the changes automatically applied in your branch.

Using your editor¶

Open your editor of choice and start editing your project. The branch will automatically detect the change and rebuild your project:

» Building project...
✓ datasources/user_actions.datasource updated
✓ Rebuild completed in 0.3s

Using Tinybird UI¶

You can also use Tinybird UI to edit your project. Run the following command to open the Tinybird UI pointing to your branch.

tb --branch=preview-1 open

tb dev exposes your project as API, so you can edit it directly in the browser and see changes applied automatically.

When to use branches¶

Branches are a great way to test your project with real production data. You should use them in the following scenarios:

• You want to test your changes with real production data.
• You work with preview environments in your CI/CD pipeline before deploying to production.
• You don't use Docker and you want to test your changes without affecting production.

Test with connector data¶

When your project uses connector data sources (Kafka, S3, or GCS), you can test them in branches using the --with-connections flag and dedicated CLI commands. This lets you validate schema changes, test pipelines, and verify data transformations against real production data without affecting your production environment.

Enable connectors in branches¶

Use --with-connections when building or starting a branch:

tb --branch=preview-1 dev --with-connections

Or when building directly:

tb --branch=preview-1 build --with-connections

This creates data linkers for your connector data sources (S3, Kafka, GCS) in the branch.

Kafka: Pause and resume ingestion¶

By default, Kafka ingestion is stopped in branches. Use tb datasource start to begin ingesting and tb datasource stop to pause.

Each time you start ingestion, a new consumer group is created with a unique ID for the branch. This means ingestion starts from the latest offset, not from where it previously left off. Consumer group IDs are unique and don't collide with production or other branches. This is by design — branches are ephemeral testing environments, not production replicas.

tb --branch=preview-1 datasource start my_kafka_datasource
# ... observe data flowing in, test your pipelines ...
tb --branch=preview-1 datasource stop my_kafka_datasource

S3/GCS: Import sample data¶

Instead of syncing all files from the bucket (as in production), you can import a small sample to validate your schemas and pipelines. The sample import runs as a separate job — it doesn't affect production sync state or offsets.

You can trigger a sample import using the CLI or the API:

tb --branch=preview-1 datasource sample my_datasource --wait

curl -X POST "https://api.tinybird.co/v0/datasources/my_datasource/sample" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <your-admin-token>"

The response includes a job_id to track progress via GET /v0/jobs/{job_id}. You can import up to 10 files per request.

This is useful for:

• Validating that your schema matches the data format.
• Testing downstream pipes and endpoints.
• Verifying data transformations.