Understanding Development and Live Versions in Bubble
Did you know that your Bubble app has got two versions? At least two depending on the plan whether you're on one of the premium pay plans or on the personal plan. In order to launch your app to connect up to your domain you need to be on the first pay plan, the personal plan and what that unlocks for you is the ability to take your development version and deploy it to your live version.
Accessing the Live Version
So your live version is the one that if someone was to go to your domain name they would get access to but if they were to go to... I just used this as an example... so I'm in my development version, my test version in the Bubble editor and then if I go to preview it I'm previewing the version - test. So this is the one that I'm building if I make changes in my editor these changes are reflected immediately on my version - test, my development version.
Deploying Changes to Live
If I want to deploy changes to my live site here then I have to deploy them and I do that by going deploy current version to live writing a description and hit deploy. So now any changes that I've made in my development version are reflected in the live version. This is not something that you get access to on the free plan this is an app on the free plan and it's prompting me to upgrade to deploy and I have to choose one of the paid plans in order to do that.
Key Differences Between Development and Live Versions
Here are a few things to bear in mind about the difference between the development and the live version. First of all your database is linked so you have a development database here we see here in this test app this database if I was to upgrade this plan and deploy it to live then it wouldn't take this database with it and this makes sense because you want to be able to create all your test users and test your development version but your live users are going to be completely separate so you'd access that by switching to the live database and then in the Bubble editor you can make direct edits to the live database just by switching it here.
Viewing Live Version in the Editor
You can also in the Bubble editor if I switch here to live I can then view the contents of my site as it is in the live version. I can't make any changes it gives me that prompt there reminding me that I'm in the live version of this read only but it can be useful for working out if there's a slight difference between the two versions or in the debugging process.
Using the "Isn't Live Version" Condition
And finally my last tip if I go back into my test app here this is something that I found really useful in conditions on workflows just go on to one of these pages you can get Bubble to tell the difference by using the isn't live version it's a bit annoying that they use a negative in there you just have to work out logic so if I hit preview there we go then it displays yes because it isn't the live version and so as well as printing this on the front end to test what this bit dynamic content does and I can put this in conditional statements and workflows.
Practical Application in Planet No Code
So in our planet no code app where we have our video library I've got certain processes such as sending specific emails when users sign up that I only want to take place when the light where the user takes the action on the live version and I can use that statement to do so.
Key Takeaways
So there we can have it that is an overview of the difference between the development version and the live version I'd say the number one takeaway there is to recognize that you have those two versions and then the number two takeaway is that your database is specific to the version so don't you can copy between them but you but if you've got a load of database types that are associated with each other it's not going to work very cleanly so if part of your app is to have like a large resource library for example then I'd recommend from day one building that in your live version rather than in your test version.