Managing a published app
Taking a site offline, what happens to its address, how caching behaves, and what deleting a project does to anything published from it.
Once an app is published, the dialog behind the Published button in the top bar is where you manage it.
The four publish states
A project records one of these at all times:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
idle |
Not published. This is the state of a new project, and of one that has been taken offline. |
publishing |
A publish is running right now. |
published |
Live. The top-bar button reads Published. |
error |
The last publish failed. The reason is shown in the dialog. |
Taking a site offline
Press Take offline in the publish dialog. The hosted files are deleted and the address stops serving immediately. A toast reads Taken offline.
Two things survive:
- Your app. Taking the site offline does nothing to the project, its files, its history or its sandbox.
- Your address. The slug stays reserved to this project. Publish again later and you get the same URL back.
That second point is the reason to use Take offline rather than deleting a project you might revive.
What visitors see at an unpublished address
A plain page:
Nothing published here This address has no published app.
The same page appears for an address that never existed.
Caching
Bookbag sets cache headers on the published site:
- Built asset files — the hashed JavaScript and CSS bundles — are cached for a year. Their names change whenever their contents change, so this is safe.
- Everything else, including your HTML pages, is cached for 60 seconds.
In practice: after a Publish update, a visitor sees the new version within about a minute, and immediately on a hard refresh.
Pages that do not exist
If your app has a 404 page, it is used. Otherwise visitors get a plain not-found response. Extensionless addresses resolve to the matching page, and a folder address resolves to its index.html, so the links inside your app work the way they do in the preview.
What it means for the sandbox
Nothing. A published site is a static copy sitting in Bookbag's hosting area; it does not talk to the sandbox and does not need it. Archive the project, stop the sandbox, restart the server — the published site keeps serving.
This is the difference between the two addresses on a project, and it is worth being clear about:
| Preview address | Published address | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A development server | A static export |
| Updates when the builder writes a file | Yes, within a second | No — only on Publish update |
| Works when the sandbox is stopped | No | Yes |
| Public | Not meaningfully — it is a localhost or sandbox address |
Yes, completely |
| Good for sharing | No | Yes |
Deleting a published project
Deleting a project takes its site offline first, then removes everything. The address is released and could be claimed by another project afterwards.
Archiving a project does not unpublish it. The sandbox stops, the project disappears from your dashboard, and the published site keeps serving as though nothing happened.
Who can manage it
Publishing, republishing, renaming the address and taking a site offline are all writes, so viewers cannot do any of them. Viewers can see the publish status and the live URL.
Next
- Organizations — who else can reach your projects.