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. So your Live version is the one that if someone was to go to your domain name, they would get access to.

Development Version

But if they were to go to if I just use 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 am previewing the version hyphen 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 hyphen test, my development version. 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.

Difference 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. 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 reminded me that I'm in the Live version, and that it's 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.

Isn't live version

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 that you kind of just have to work out the 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, I can put this in conditional statements and workflows. 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 a user takes the action on the live version, and I can use that statement to do so. So there we 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 recognise that you have those two versions. Then the number two takeaway is that your database is specific to the version, so you can copy between them.

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 the building that in your live version rather than in your test version.