'Dry Run' Deployment
Sometimes deployments are bad due to bad configuration variables that are un-testable before releasing to production.
Having the ability to 'dry run' a deployment and see all the task outputs with specific highlighting for variables and evaluated variables would allow the identification of changes that need to be made before actually deploying to an environment.

Variable preview shipped in 2018.3.
We are not planning further investments in this area at this time.
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David Peden commented
I came here from http://help.octopusdeploy.com/discussions/questions/3312-test-variable-substitution-in-config-files and am following Vanessa's suggestion to comment here. Technically, I think these should be two different requests as one seems way simpler than the other.
What I really want is "Preview Transforms and Substitutions" more so than a dry run. Having to go through the whole build process to view the output is painful. Thanks!
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Robin M commented
I get a lot of value from the whatif feature in msdeploy which gives information about where the deployment is going and what's being changed in IIS and on the filesystem. Looking to switch to Octopus so a 'dry run' feature would be welcome.
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Anders Truelsen commented
Show variables in the Release dialog does not evaluate the variables to their actual values.
Eg. if one variable uses one or more variables to produce its value the final value is not shown.This would make up for not having "dry run".
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Adam Bezverkov commented
If all this feature did was show the evaluated variables, transforms, and variable substitutions it would still be immensely helpful!
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Anonymous commented
This would be an extremely valuable functionality as a growing number of variables and incresed complexity due to transformations and combinations of input, results in a lot of calculated variables.
It will take hours to find out if we have configured correctly for all environments, but Octopus will be able to evaluate them in seconds.