Publishing your app
Going live, going offline, and the difference between what you see and what the world sees.
Preview and published are two different things
While you build, what the Preview tab shows is the draft: it reflects the last applied change, and only you and whoever has access to the project can see it.
The published app is another copy, frozen at the state of the last publish. Editing does not touch it. That is what lets you work calmly on an app that already has users: they keep seeing the previous version until you decide the new one is ready.
Publish
The Publish button is in the editor's top bar, not in a tab. One click, and the current draft becomes the public version.
After publishing, the Studio shows the app's address and a ready-made line to share. The address is <something>.fabapp.app, and you can change the front part under Domains, in "Edit URL", or point a domain of your own at it.
Publishing consumes no credits.
The "Made with Fabapp" badge
On the Free plan, anyone who opens your app sees a discreet platform mark in the corner. It disappears from Starter up.
Taking it offline
Same button in the top bar. Unpublishing deletes nothing: the project, the code and the data stay where they were, and publishing again puts the app back online.
If the published app differs from the preview
Almost always one of these two:
- you edited and did not publish again. The preview shows the draft, the public sees the last publish;
- your browser is holding the old version in cache. Test in a private window before concluding the publish failed.
Before showing it to anyone
It is worth opening the published app on a phone, not just on a computer. The generated app is responsive and becomes a PWA (people install it on their home screen straight from the browser, with no app store), but the phone is where the text that overflowed shows up.