Publishing and deploying

Production projects often require a minimal workflow to determine what needs to go to production and to make sure the end user experience is isolated from the development of new features. Botfront allows to publish stories and deploy your project to serve those purposes.

Deploy your project

Note: to use the integrated deployment feature you need to implement a deployment webhook.

The development environment is the sandbox where you create or edit your project. Once you are satisfied with what you have in the development environment, you can deploy your project and make it available to end users. The environment in which your project is deployed is call the production environment, and is completely isolated from the development environment.

All the changes you make after deploying your project will only be effective in the development environment, and will not affect your end users experience. At anytime, you can deploy your project again to bring your changes to the production environment and your end users.

To deploy a project to production, simply expand the Train everything button and click on Deploy to production.

Publish stories

When a new story is created it has the unpublished status. An unpublished story will not be available to your end users when you deploy your project. However, it will always be available in the development environment once trained.

This allows to selectively deploy stories. For example, some of your stories might not be finished or approved to hit production. Or some stories are meant to be published only at certain times when there is a special promotion or a temporary service disruption.

To publish a story, turn the switch on in the story menu: