Publishing Flow

Shipcode offers a two-step publishing process. Once you've made changes to your application, the first step is to promote the changes to the Staging environment. Staging is a pre-production environment where you can privately test your changes for both web and native.

Once the changes have been approved on Staging, they can be promoted to the Production environment. Once this takes place, the updates will be available on your live sites and apps.

Configuring the Publishing Environments

Configuring the Publishing Environments requires the Administrator role.

You can configure the Staging and Production environments within the Project Settings menu:

1. Click on your account avatar in the Top Bar
2. Click "Project Settings"
3. Click "Publishing Environments"
4. Click "Edit Environments"
5. Click on either Staging or Production
6. Make your desired changes
7. Click "Save"

The first change you can make is selecting which Data Environment is utilized by Staging and Production. Data Environments give you the ability to register variables that can have different values for different environments. For example, you may wish to point an API to different URLs for Staging and Production. Refer to Data Environments for more information.

If your app is using a custom domain for staging or production, you can provide the domain name so that Shipcode's preview links point to the correct location. To change the domain, enable the "Use custom URL" checkbox and then provide your domain. Un-check the "Use custom URL" checkbox to use the Shipcode-provided domain.

Promoting to Staging

Promoting content requires the Administrator or Publisher role.

From the Top Bar

1. Click the "Promote" button in the Top Bar
2. Optionally provide "Name" and "Notes" to identify the contents of the release
3. Click "Promote" in the modal

From the Version Panel

1. Open the Version panel from the Left Sidebar
2. Click the menu (three dot) icon next to the desired snapshot
3. Click "Promote"
4. Optionally provide "Name" and "Notes" to identify the contents of the release
5. Click "Promote" in the modal

Viewing Changes on Staging

After promotion, the confirmation modal will contain a "Preview" link. Click on the link to view the QR code for your project. Click on the QR code to navigate to the web staging site. Scan the QR code with your Shipcode App to view the staging version of your native app.

You can also access the preview link and QR code at any time from the Versions Panel:

1. Open the Versions Panel in the Left Sidebar
2. Click on the "Publishing" tab
3. Next to the desired release (indicated with a "Staging" badge), click the menu (three dot) icon
4. Click "Preview on Web" to view the staging site
5. Click "Preview on App" to view the QR code to scan with your Shipcode App

Promoting to Production

Promoting content requires the Administrator or Publisher role.

1. Open the Versions Panel in the Left Sidebar
2. Click on the "Publishing" tab
3. Next to the desired release (indicated with a "Staging" badge), click the menu (three dot) icon
4. Click "Promote"
5. Optionally provide "Name" and "Notes" to identify the contents of the release
6. Click "Promote" in the modal