Netlify tip: Explore and download assets generated by your builds
Tags: webdev, hosting, tips
Published: 2024-02-12 12:32:00

---
title: Netlify tip: Explore and download assets generated by your builds
published: true
description: Explore the output generated by any of the builds run in Netlify and download them to inspect them individually or as in their entirety
tags: webdev, hosting, tips
cover_image: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/8ac1fb9tv2gx1idehc58.png
published_at: 2024-02-12 12:32 +0000
canonical_url: https://developers.netlify.com/guides/deploy-file-explorer/
---

Understanding what assets your build generates is an important part of developing for the web. During local development that is usually easy to do, but what if you need compare the assets generated by a previous build? Or if you're looking for assurance that an asset is being faithfully generated by Netlify's build pipeline in the same way as it is locally? Netlify's _Deploy file explorer_ can help.

## TL;DR

You can download the output from any of your successful deploys in a single zip file, or by exploring the file structure generated by your builds. This post shows you where the [Netlify Admin UI](https://app.netlify.com) you can do this, and gives you a simple one-click deploy to try this out for yourself if you've never deployed a site to Netlify before.

## Prerequisites

1. [A Netlify account](https://app.netlify.com/login)
1. A site successfully deployed to Netlify


>  If you don't have a site deployed to Netlify to experiment with yet, I've got you covered. Clicking the button below will create a new site for you from a simple template, set up the deployment pipeline, and perform your first deploy for your to explore.

[![Deploy to Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/img/deploy/button.svg?v=2)](https://app.netlify.com/start/deploy?repository=https://github.com/netlify/netlify-feature-tour)

## Just show me

If you prefer to watch a quick video of this, here's how it looks.

{% embed https://youtu.be/r5L9yKMGroA %}


## Where to find the Deploy file explorer

The _Deploy file explorer_ inspects the assets generated by completed build, so is available for each successful deploy regardless of if this is production, branch, or preview build.

Navigate to the Deploys page of any of your sites in the [Netlify Admin](https://app.netlify.com), and then select any successful deploy.

Below the _Deploy log_ panel, you'll find the _Deploy file explorer_ where you can navigate through the assets tree of your generated build, and search within it to find precisely what you are looking for.


![Explore the assets of any deploy](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/5a04lepnzqnlyjglbaq2.png)



## Download the entire deploy

You can also download any of your successful deploys in their entirety as a single zip file.

The information panel above the _Deploy summary_ contains various pieces of information about your deploy. There you'll find a download link which will generate an archive for you to download as a single asset containing all of the files included in that deploy.

![Download your entire deploy](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/8ey7yxiiw6qm6wmiltl2.png)



It's good practice not to commit build output to version control, so this feature is a useful way to quickly recover and explore historical archives of different versions of your sites.