Publish an Experience to Production | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• A quick refresher on commits and builds
• How to publish an experience to Production
• Updating the Production Search Configuration label

Commits and Builds Refresher

This step will always be done exclusively by the Admin.

Remember from the Overview of Search Frontend module that when you commit frontend changes, you are presented with a modal to add a commit message and commit tag to the commit.

For the Commit Message, this is to tell yourself and other users what the commit was for and is a standard practice in development. Keep your commit message succinct but descriptive.

For the Tag, this is so that you can easily publish these specific changes. Your tag needs to follow Git conventions so something like “2020-05-02” is valid, but “starting point” is not. You can always go back to a commit and add the tag later. We recommend using something like a date system or a semantic versioning system to keep track of your commit tags.

When you publish a site to production, you will always reference a specific commit tag and never a branch (like “build” or “master”).

Publishing to Production

Once you’ve fully tested the experience in Staging, you can publish to Production from the Deploys screen.

Note: Ensure you’ve updated the Configuration Label for your backend configuration in the Experiences tab to the most recent version (i.e. the version you tested in Staging). Check the steps at the bottom for a refresher.

On the deploys screen, locate the deploy you want to publish. Make sure the initial build and page generation phases of the deploy are successful - if not, click into them and resolve any errors before publishing to production. Click the dropdown on the right and click Publish to production.

Updating Production Search Configuration Label

Once you’ve published your site to production, you’ll want to make sure that your Search Configuration labels are up-to-date. As you learned in Search Configuration Overview , your Production label should be on the latest, specific Search Configuration version.

Navigate back to Search > Your Experience > Configuration Labels and confirm that Production is pinned to a specific version number. For example, if Staging is on version LATEST (6), Production should be on a specific version # (likely one of the more recent versions such as 5 or 6). This will ensure that the latest backend configuration is pointed to the frontend production URL.

As you update the Search Configuration going forward, you can test your changes at the staging frontend URL. Once you QA and approve of those changes, you can keep versioning up your backend Search Configuration to the latest, stable, Admin-approved version. The same logic applies to the frontend changes that you make, where you’ll test at the staging URL (in addition to live preview) before updating production.