Publish your site

Publishing turns your project into a real website with its own public address, that anyone can open — no account needed. It takes one click and a few minutes. Hosting and HTTPS are included.

Before you publish

• Test it in the preview — pages, forms, mobile. See Try it before you share it.
• Check your plan. Publishing online is included in the Starter and Pro plans. On the Free plan you can build and preview, and the Publish button shows Publish — Starter or Pro. The free trial of Starter needs no card.
• Add any secret keys your site needs (payment keys, API keys) in Variables, never in the chat. See Environment variables.

Publish in one click

1. In the project's top bar, click Publish.
2. The button shows Publishing… while FromScratch builds a production version of your app and starts it. This usually takes a few minutes — a shop takes longer than a simple site. You can keep working in the meantime.
3. When it's done, the project shows Published and a Live badge, and you get a notification.

Your site is now online at an address based on your project's Site address — a subdomain such as https://your-site.<our apps domain>, with HTTPS. Copy the link and share it.

When your site is working and hasn't been published yet, FromScratch also shows a card above the chat composer — Your site works: put it online — with a Put it online button. On a paid plan it starts the same publish; on the Free plan it shows what the paid plans include. Later hides the card.

What exactly goes online

Publishing takes a snapshot of your project as it is at that moment: its pages, its content, its data and the values saved in Variables. FromScratch builds an optimised production version from it (faster than the preview), starts it on our hosting and connects your address to it. Your project's workspace and its preview keep running separately, so you can continue editing without visitors seeing half-finished work.

Tip

Want a nicer address? Click the Site address in the top bar to change the subdomain (letters, digits and dashes, at least three characters), then republish. Or connect your own domain name — see Use your own domain.

Update the live site: Republish

Your published site does not change by itself when you keep working. The preview always shows your latest changes; the live site shows the version from your last publish. When you're happy with new changes:

1. Open the Publish menu.
2. Click Republish.

The new version replaces the old one after the build. Each publish is also saved as a Published version in Versions, so you can always see what was live and go back to it.

If something looks stuck, Rebuild and redeploy builds and starts the site again from scratch.

If the build fails

If publishing doesn't work, the button shows Build failed and offers Retry. Most of the time the cause is something in the app that only shows up in the production build. Ask the agent:

Publishing failed with "Build failed". Can you find out why, fix it, and tell me when I can publish again?

Then click Retry. If the message says the publish timed out — check the status, then try again, wait a minute, reload the page and look at the status before trying again.

Take your site offline

To remove your site from the internet, open the Publish menu and click Unpublish. FromScratch asks Take this app offline?; confirm, and the public address stops working. Your project, its preview and its versions are untouched — you can publish again whenever you want.

Note

Variables you save in Variables on a published project are updated on the live site too (it restarts with the new values). Code and content changes, on the other hand, always need a Republish.

Shops

Publishing a shop works the same way, with one extra rule: product, payment and region changes you make in the preview reach the live shop when you republish. See Publish and update a shop.

FAQ

Related

• Publish, republish, unpublish
• Use your own domain
• Get found on Google