Deploying and Launching Your App (Publishing)

Congratulations! You’ve spent countless hours crafting your application, and now it’s time to present it to the world. This chapter will guide you on how to deploy and launch your project to ensure a smooth and successful deployment.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll possess the essential skills and knowledge necessary to prepare your app for deployment effectively and confidently navigate the process of launching your app to the public. You’ll understand the significance of meticulous preparation, ensuring a smooth and error-free launch, and be equipped to make your app globally accessible.

We will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the concept of deploying an application
• Preparing for deployment – reviewing, previewing, and testing the app
• How to set up a custom domain
• Launching your app to the public

Understanding the concept of deploying an application

After building your application, it is time to make it live and available to the world. This is a very exciting moment, but it also requires paying attention to avoid problems. If you are new to the tech world, you might be wondering, what does it mean to deploy? Deploying an application refers to the process of making the developed software or application available and accessible to end users. Usually, when you develop software, you run and test it on a separate environment, which is only visible and accessible to the development team. This project is not released to the public until it is ready. Once it is ready, you send it to the outside world so that everyone can see it. Bubble has two different environments: the development environment and the live environment. These are separate. When you start building things inside Bubble, you will be working on the development environment and will have to manually choose when to send things...

Preparing for deployment – reviewing, previewing, and testing the app

Providing a great user experience to your users is key. Deploying a broken app can damage your app’s reputation and can be a headache if you are working for a client. So, to avoid these situations, doing a meticulous review before deploying is important. If you are working in a lean and agile way, you might want to deploy and ship new features often, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you will neglect testing. It is important to add a final step to your development sprints before the deployment to ensure you are shipping things that work and were tested. If needed, work with a QA team to help you with this process. If you are working by yourself, just make sure to add this to your routine. Before sending your app out into the world, do a proper review and test to ensure it is ready to use and working properly.

Here is a list of some important things to consider when deploying a Bubble application...

How to set up a custom domain

Adding a custom domain provides a professional and branded touch to your application’s web address. Let’s go through the step-by-step procedure to configure and link a custom domain to your app:

1. The first step is to choose a domain name. Go to a domain registrar website of your choice, such as Godaddy, Google Domains, NameCheap, Name.com, or Porkbun, and buy the domain. You don’t need to buy hosting, just the domain. Hosting is already provided by Bubble.
2. Now, go inside Bubble and upgrade your plan to at least the first paid plan so that you can set up a custom domain. Free plans won’t let you configure it, so it is important to upgrade your plan.
3. Open your project and navigate to the Domain settings tab. Under the Domain/email section, you will see a place to add your custom domain. Simply type the domain you bought there:

   Domain settings as shown here:

Figure 11.2: Domain settings...

Launching the app to the public

Once your app has been refined and tested, it’s time to introduce it to the world. Launching can be exciting and you can choose how it is going to look. In practice, it just means pushing a button, but you can choose to celebrate and tell the world about it too. It’s up to you.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide on how to deploy your application. To deploy your application, you need to upgrade to a paid plan. Click the button at the top to Upgrade to deploy and choose a plan. After that, proceed with the checkout process.

Once you have a paid plan, you can start deploying:

1. When your issue tracker is clear, and you’re ready to deploy your app, you can initiate the process, which is virtually instantaneous. Begin by clicking the version control button located in the top-right corner of the Bubble toolbar:

Figure 11.6: Deploying your app

2. After clicking the main button, a new...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the main aspects of deploying and launching an application on Bubble.io. You learned the fundamental concepts of deployment and how the development and live environments work. You also learned how to prepare for deployment by testing and reviewing your app.

Additionally, a detailed checklist was provided, outlining essential preparatory measures before deployment, ensuring a smooth and error-free launch.

You also learned how to set up a custom domain to allow your users to access and use your application more professionally.

This chapter also explained how to effectively launch your app to the public.

Understanding these concepts will be important so that you can launch any application you build in the future. In the next chapter, you will learn about optimization and performance enhancement techniques you can implement to improve your Bubble.io applications.

Further reading

If you need more information about branches, version control, and deployment features, please refer to the Bubble official documentation: https://manual.bubble.io/help-guides/getting-started/navigating-the-bubble-editor/deploying-your-app.