We are working on a new version of a website. The current version is indexed by google, everything looks fine. The new version will have more or less the same content & links, but we are changing the design slightly & implement a new architecture (eg. using AngularJS etc). We want to test the new version which is still under development to see how google will fetch it. We added a robots.txt file to 'disallow /' because we don't want google to index our development server.Is it safe or recommended to use the fetch as google tool before the release of the new version?PS: I think this post suggests to wait until the release:Manual Fetch as Google or better wait? But then,  how could we test that google will see all the content correctly?
fetch as google on development environment
google search console;fetch as google
There are two possibilities, use the noindex meta or use the X-Robots-Tag header. We used both.https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag?hl=enOur solution was to change the robots.txt and allow only google to crawl our pages:eg.User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot Allow: / but disallow it to index them by using the header X-Robots-Tag: noindex and also adding the meta eg. <meta name=googlebot content=noindex />