What Happens When You Stage and Publish Visual Applications?

When you're ready to share your work with others, youl use the Stage option in the menu in the upper right corner to generate a URL for your application that you can share with your team and ask for feedback. After the application is thoroughly tested, you use the Publish option to make your app live.

To stage and publish an app, you deploy the app's resources to the Visual Builder runtime environment that provides services used by the staged and published apps.

Note:

If you want to deploy a visual application to multiple instances, the best option is to use VB Studio to set up additional deployment instances. See Add Additional Deployment Instances.

The Visual Builder runtime environment provides the server for delivering pages in web applications, and services your web apps might use to access data, including the database used to store data and the proxy server for managing connections to REST services. The runtime is used when you are designing apps in the Designer and for staged and published applications. The runtime also helps manage the authentication and authorization of app users.

The following steps are performed for you when you stage an app:
  • The application's resources are copied to a directory on the server
  • The database schema in the staging database is updated with changes from the development database
  • A URL is created for accessing the staged web app. The web app accesses the services and resources provided by the staged application.

When you stage an app, you can choose to copy the data from your development database to the staging database, create a database with no data, or use the data already in the database if it has already been staged. See Stage a Visual Application.

The following steps are performed for you when you publish an app:
  • The directory containing the staged application's resources becomes the live app. The staged app is not accessible after it is published.
  • The database schema in the live database is updated with changes from the staging database. You can choose if and how data should be migrated from the staging database to the live database.
  • A new permanent URL is created for accessing the live web app. The web app accesses the services and resources provided by the published app.
See Publish a Visual Application.

You must stage an app before you can publish it. When an app is published, the staged app becomes the live version, and the app settings defined for the staged app are applied to the published app. You should confirm that an app's settings, for example, its security settings and credentials, are working correctly before you publish an app, because these cannot be modified after it is published without creating a new version and staging and publishing it again. For example, when you are ready to publish an app, you might need to modify the credentials and authentication mechanism you used for connecting to a service during development because they are not suitable for the published app. In this case, you will need to edit the app to specify the credentials required for the published app and stage it again.

The runtime environment also provides a proxy server that your apps can use to help with authorizing calls to services. For example, you can use the proxy server to avoid potential CORS issues when calling a service. This is convenient if you are sending to requests to services in another domain and you cannot modify its allowlist. You can bypass the proxy if you choose, for example, by using the Direct authentication mechanism in your app to call services.