Publishing your app

Publishing puts your app online at its own address, so people can use it without the App Builder. What goes online is a built copy of your project, a version: your project keeps changing in the App Builder as usual, and the published app only changes when you decide to update it.

The Publish button sits in the header bar of the editor. Its label tells you where the app stands: not published yet, publishing, or published. It opens the app’s Settings on Publish app. The same settings open from Project Settings, at the bottom of the tool rail, and keep everything about the publication in one place: Publish app, Access & sharing, and Supabase. An entry that cannot act yet is greyed, and still opens: its page shows what it offers, inactive, under what it waits for. Access & sharing waits for the first publication, Supabase for an online app connected to a Supabase project.

The address

Your app gets an address of its own, on ALIGN’s domain for published apps. You propose its name, ALIGN checks whether it is free while you type, and shows you the full address before you publish.

Each app lives on its own address, never in a folder of a shared one. Two apps never share their visitors’ sessions, and your app cannot read anything that belongs to ALIGN or to another app.

Who can open it

Access	Who gets in
Public	Anyone with the link, no ALIGN account needed.
Organization	Every member of your organization, viewers included.
Groups	Members of the groups you pick.
Private	You and your organization’s admins.

A first publication starts as Private: choose a wider access before you publish if the app is meant for more people.

For everything but Public, visitors sign in with their ALIGN account on the app’s address: someone who is signed in and allowed goes straight in, someone who is not allowed reads that the app is not available for their account. A visitor stays signed in to the app for an hour; after that, ALIGN checks them again, without asking anything while they are still signed in to ALIGN and still allowed. You can change the access at any time on Access & sharing: pick the level, then Save access. It takes effect within a minute, and it needs no new build.

The access decides who may open the app. What visitors can do inside it is up to your app: an app connected to a Supabase database keeps its own sign-in and its own rules, and the two combine. An internal tool can be restricted to your organization and still ask its users to sign in to its database.

Sharing it with people outside ALIGN

An app that is not public can still be opened by someone without an ALIGN account, with a share link. On Access & sharing, Share with people outside ALIGN creates one: give it a name and a lifetime, or type email addresses and each person receives their own link. A link opens this app, and only this app, until it expires or you Revoke it; revoking takes effect within a minute. The emails go out from ALIGN, so their number is limited each day, for your organization, for each member and for each recipient. Past the limit, copy the link and send it yourself.

Anyone holding a link, or its QR code, can open the app: pass it on like a key, never on a public page, and keep it short-lived for anything sensitive. A public app needs no link: the page offers the QR code of its address, and the share links stay on screen, inactive, until you choose another access.

An expired link stays listed, marked expired, for 30 days, then it is deleted, along with the address it was sent to. When a member leaves your organization, the links they created stop opening your organization’s apps: they keep the address, not the access.

Signing in with Supabase

If your app signs its users in with Supabase, Supabase only sends them back to addresses listed in the redirect URLs of your Supabase project. When a Supabase project is linked to your app, Supabase shows whether the published address is in that list, and Add to Supabase adds it for you. Nothing is changed in your Supabase project until you click, and your Supabase account must be an owner or an administrator of the project.

Once it is in your project’s redirect URLs, the address stays your organization’s, even after you unpublish: no other organization can ever take it. ALIGN does not remove it from your Supabase project; remove it there yourself when you no longer need it.

Publishing, and what a build costs

Publishing builds your app on ALIGN’s servers, then puts the result online. The first publication takes a minute or two. You can wait in the settings, or close them and come back: the build carries on without you.

Each build uses your organization’s credit budget, for the time it runs. A build that fails costs its time too, and never touches the version already online.

Before anything goes online, ALIGN checks the build output. A build that contains a secret, such as a private key or a database key that bypasses its security rules, is refused, and Publish app names the file. Only public keys belong in a published app: the Supabase anon or publishable key is fine, a secret key (sb_secret_…, or the older service role key) never is.

Updating it

Your published app does not follow your edits on its own. When your changes are ready, Publish update builds the current state of your project and switches the app to the new version. Visitors who are loading the app at that moment are not cut off: the previous version stays available for a few minutes, time for them to finish, and their next visit opens the new one.

Versions

Publish app lists the last versions of your app. Restore puts one of them back online instantly, with no build and no cost. The most recent versions are kept; older ones are removed as new ones arrive.

Storage and traffic

Your published app draws on the same allowances as the rest of your organization:

• the traffic it serves counts in your organization’s monthly traffic, shown on the Usage page next to your published maps. When the traffic of the billing cycle is used up, published apps are paused and come back on their own when traffic is available again: next cycle, a bigger plan, or extra traffic in Plans & Capacity. A paused app shows a neutral “temporarily unavailable” page;
• its kept versions count in your organization’s storage, next to the Datastore. On the Usage page they are added to the storage of the member who published the app. When the storage is full, a new build is refused before it starts, and Publish app points you to Plans & Capacity.

If your organization’s subscription is suspended, its published apps go offline until it is back in good standing.

Taking it offline

Unpublish takes the app offline, removes every version, and frees the storage they used. The address stays reserved for this app for a while, so publishing it again gets you the same one back. Deleting the project, or the organization, takes its published app offline too, and so does putting the project in the trash: restoring it does not publish the app again, you publish it when you are ready.

Not available yet

• Your own domain. Apps are published on ALIGN’s domain for now.