| The capabilities described on this page are included in Appian's standard capability tier. Usage limits may apply. |
Making continuous improvements and updates to your portal is important to ensure the best possible experience for your users. To make your portal available to your users, you'll need to publish, test, and deploy your portal.
A portal consists of a portal object and at least one interface object. The interfaces contain the content for the portal object, displayed as separate pages. The portal object contains the settings used to create the portal.
When you publish a portal, Appian bundles up the portal object, the interface, and all of the objects used by the interface, and publishes them all as a cohesive serverless web app at a unique URL.
Publishing a portal makes it available to your users at the specified web address. This means that anyone with the URL can access your portal. For more information, see Who can access a portal during testing?.
You'll only be publishing a portal directly during development. If you've published the portal in the source environment, Appian automatically applies that publishing status to the portal object in the target environment after you successfully deploy the object. No extra steps required! For more information, see the Deployments and publishing section below.
To publish a portal:
If you no longer need for your portal to be available to users, you can easily unpublish the portal:
Once your portal is published, we automatically republish it when you save changes to your portal object or portal object precedents. This ensures that your published portal is up-to-date with your latest changes and ready to test.
Though it is usually unnecessary, you can still manually republish your portal at any time. There are three scenarios when you may want to manually republish:
To manually republish your portal:
As with all Appian applications, you should always fully test all objects that your portal relies on to make sure everything is functioning correctly. Be sure to test everything in your portal interface, including all input and selection fields, and connections, queries, and processes.
After you've tested all objects and connections for your portal in Appian Designer, it's important to fully test your portal after it is published. Be sure to fill out all of the fields, whether they are required or not, and go through all of the steps in your portal. If you run into any issues while testing, check out the Visitor Activity Logs in your Portal object.
This will help mitigate the following concerns:
Additionally, be sure to fully test all parts of the connections to your portal with a production-level data and usage. This includes all web APIs, integrations, and connected systems.
See Configuring reCAPTCHA for additional information on testing reCAPTCHA.
You must publish your portal to fully test it, which means that anyone with the web address can access your portal, maybe even before you're ready for them to.
To help limit access to the portal while you're testing, UUIDs are added by default to the web addresses of all portals in your development and testing environments. This means that only users that you share the URL with will be able to easily find the portal during development.
In production environments, this option is deselected by default to make the web addresses more intuitive and easier for your users to access them.
This setting can be changed in the Administration Console.
You can easily deploy a portal from one environment to another as a part of your existing deployment pipeline. Simply deploy your portal object as part of a deployment package or application. Make sure to include all precedents of your portal object with your deployment.
For more information on packages and deployments, see:
As with all objects, when you deploy a portal object all of the fields and configurations are deployed with it. After deployment, the value of the portal object's Published field in the target environment will be the same as the Published field value in the source environment.
For example:
When deploying a published portal, the portal will automatically publish in the target environment during deployment.
If your portal is published in the target environment and you deploy an updated precedent of the portal to that environment, the portal will automatically republish after import to include the latest updates.
In some cases, you may need to provide connection information in an import customization file (ICF) when deploying portals. This table outlines the information you may need to provide in an ICF.
| If your portal uses… | Don't forget! |
|---|---|
| Integrations and Web APIs to write or query data | ICF with API keys |
| Querying or writing data directly from a publicly accessible external database | ICF with data source connected system credentials |
| Google reCAPTCHA connected system | ICF with connected system credentials |
| Environment specific constant | ICF with value of constant |
| Integration to external system | ICF with connected system credentials |
In order to publish your portal automatically after deployment, you need to set up your portal service account with the required permissions in your target environment.
Before deploying your portal you must perform the following in each environment in the deployment pipeline:
Manage a Portal
