Preview, integration and publication are different things
A preview is your running environment that others may be allowed to see. Integration merges your branch into the shared branch of the project. Publication is neither, and it is not part of Projects or Workspace.
- Availability: Experimental
- Evidence: Recorded run
- Explanation
The problem this solves
You saved a file, a colleague saw it in your preview, and you chose Integrate changes. Is it live? No. Three different things happened, and none of them is publication.
The three in plain language
| What it is | Who sees the result | What it changes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preview | Your own running environment, shown on its own address | You; the members you allow; anyone holding a visitor link you created | Nothing. It shows your current files, and it disappears when your environment stops |
| Integration | Your branch merged into the shared branch of the project | Everyone who develops the project | The shared branch of the project, and nothing outside the project |
| Publication | Releasing an application, or publishing a package, for the public | Whoever uses the published address | What the public receives |
Before any of them there are two smaller steps, which are yours alone: saving writes a file in your environment, and a checkpoint commits your saved files to your own branch. See the three numbers of Review.
What does not follow from what
- A preview is mutable. It always shows what you have now, including work that nobody has reviewed. A visitor link shares a look at your environment, not a version of anything.
- A preview never starts by being looked at, and it is not activity: your environment can stop while visitors are watching.
- Integrating is not reviewing by someone else. Anyone who can write integrates; the review shows the difference, a verification and the conflicts, and decides nothing.
- Integrating is not publishing. Workspace says so above the button, and there is no Publish action in Beyond Projects or in Workspace. Nothing there releases, deploys or makes anything public.
- Publication has its own tools, permissions and contracts. The CDN prepares an application as a release that never changes afterwards and promotes it to an environment; see Releases, promotion and rollback. Those pages describe contracts, and nothing is hosted.
- Archiving or deleting a project in Projects unpublishes nothing: see Project, organization and account.
More detail
- Each person has a branch of their own in the project and an environment of their own. The shared branch is only moved forward by an integration and is never forced; an integration that would conflict is rejected and changes nothing.
- A project generated from the project template shows an edit in the preview after a reload, not by updating the running page. That is a property of the preview, and says nothing about what is integrated or published.