Publishing your content
Publishing is a way to maintain a healthy lifecycle management process. You can create incremental versions of your content over time, making it easier to manage deployment of changes and roll back (revert) to prior versions if necessary.
When you are ready to create a snapshot of your content and settings, you can publish from the Publish page. Each time that you publish, you create a new version, such as V1 or V2.
When you publish your content, watsonx Assistant creates a snapshot of the draft content, resulting in a version. This version contains all of the content from actions, including settings and variables. Versions do not contain integration configurations or environment settings. Integration configurations and environment settings must be configured manually in each environment.
The three most recent published versions appear in a list on the Publish page itself. If you have more than three versions, you can click View all to see a list of all published versions.
The number of versions that can be maintained depends on the type of plan you have. If you reach the plan limit of versions you can have, you need to delete a version before you can publish another one.
| Service plan | Published versions |
|---|---|
| Enterprise | 50 |
| Premium (legacy) | 50 |
| Plus | 10 |
| Trial | 10 |
| Lite | 2 |
How to publish
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If changes are available to publish, click Publish.
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Enter a description of the version.
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Choose to publish to the live environment, or to create a version without publishing. If you choose to create a version, you can use the environment tab to publish that version later.
With the Enterprise plan, you can publish to an environment you added. For more information, see Adding and using multiple environments.
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Click Publish:
Publish all content -
After you publish, the list is clear until you make more edits to your content.
No changes
What is being published?
When you publish, a snapshot is taken of the current state of actions. All updates to actions content are published in a version, including the following updates:
- Creating an action
- Editing an action
- Editing actions settings
- Deleting actions
- Creating variables
- Editing variables
- Deleting variables
If you are using dialog with actions, these updates are published:
- Activating dialog
- Creating a dialog
- Editing a dialog
- Editing dialog settings
- Deleting a dialog
The following updates are not published in a version and must be configured manually for each environment:
- Channel configurations
- Environment settings
Publishing or switching versions in the live environment
There are two ways to publish a version to the live environment:
- When you publish a version from the draft environment
- Use the Live environment tab and click Publish version.
After a version is published to the live environment, there are two ways you can switch to a different version:
- When you publish a version from the draft environment, you have the option of assigning it to the live environment, replacing the one that's already there
- Use the Live environment tab and click Switch version.
Reverting to a previous version
Use the revert function if you need to update a version of content that is already published to a version. For example, if you publish V1 of your content and then notice an error, you can revert your actions to V1 and use the draft environment to correct the error.
If you revert to a previous version, your published content isn't affected, but the content on the Actions page is overwritten with the version that you revert to. For example, if you decide to revert to V1 of your content, all content on the Actions page is overwritten with the V1 content so you can continue to work on it.
To revert to a previous version:
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On the Publish page, click Revert.
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On the Publish content tab, choose whether you want to save your in-progress actions as a content version so that you don't lose your current work. For example, if you are reverting to V1 and you choose to create a version, V2 is created so you can resume work on it later.
To create a version, check Publish content and add a description.
Publish content -
Next, select the version of content that you want to revert to, then click Publish & Revert.
Revert to a prior version -
After you revert, you can go to the Actions page to make any fixes or updates. When you're ready to publish, go to the Publish page and publish your updated content as a new version (for example, V3).