Case sensitivity in branch deploys

[eliperelman]

Wanted to drop a note that I ran into an issue with branch deploys that contain uppercased letters. For example, if I set an alias as alias: ISSUE-000, the deployment shows as successful as https://issue-000--my-app.netlify.app, but opening the URL returns a 404. If I lowercase the value first, then the deployment is actually successful. May be worth putting a note in the docs for this caveat.

[nwtgck]

@eliperelman Thank you very much for your reporting!

Is it better to lowercase the alias by this action? Or that may be the responsibility of the Netlify library, https://github.com/netlify/js-client/.

[prcr]

I also ran into this issue, since my branch names typically have uppercase characters and forward slashes. The alias is also limited to 37 characters, but I found that I needed to truncate the alias to 35 to make it work. It took me a while to figure out what was the issue since the deployment is reported as being successful in these scenarios.

I resorted to using other GitHub Actions to sanitize, convert to lowercase, and truncate the branch names, but this adds a lot of unwanted complexity to the GitHub Actions workflow.

Since unfortunately the issue netlify/js-client#138 didn't have any activity for a long time, I suggest that we have this GitHub Action perform the required sanitization and conversions to the alias for now. @nwtgck if you're aligned with this idea I can open a pull request to suggest the change. I noticed that #658 already proposes removing the forward slashes, but we could have a more robust solution built on top of that.

[prcr]

May be worth putting a note in the docs for this caveat.

@eliperelman this is also a good suggestion that can already help save some time for other people hitting this issue. I opened #742. 🚀