The App Maker editor and user apps will be shut down on January 19, 2021. New application creation is disabled. Learn more

Preview and publish

To run an App Maker app, publish it in a preview instance or a deployment:

  • The preview instance lets you test app behavior while you develop the app.
  • A deployment instance lets you make your app available for other people to run at the given URL. Deployments don't change as you edit your app. To make changes live, republish the app to the deployment.

To share your app, you can share the deployment URL with your users and publish it to G Suite Marketplace.

Preview your app

You can preview your apps as you develop them to test their layout and behavior:

  1. Open App Maker and open your app.
  2. Click Preview.

The preview instance has two important characteristics:

  • A preview instance is private and your own. The preview instance is your own, and only you can view the preview instance that you open. When you and another developer preview an app at the same time, you have separate previews and separate databases. If you published a version of your app, the published version isn't affected when you preview a new version.
  • You have Admin role permissions. When you're in preview mode, you use the app with the built-in Admin role. If you define other access roles and want to test them, you must publish your app to a deployment.

Publish your app

Publish your app to create a functional deployment that you can use to test access roles or to make a tested and secured app available to your users.

When you publish an app, App Maker deploys the most recent revision of your app. You can also republish an earlier revision. For instructions, go to Manage and edit a published app.

  1. Open App Maker and open your app.
  2. Click Publish.
  3. Before you publish, consider who should own the deployment. Whoever publishes the app owns the deployment and is the only person who can edit, republish, or delete that deployment. Learn more
  4. To publish your app for the first time or to update an existing deployment with the latest revision, click Publish.
  5. Select how you want to publish the deployment:
    • publish a new deployment—The default option when you publish an app for the first time.
    • update an existing deployment—Replaces an earlier deployment with the current revision of your app. This action preserves the existing app URL and all other deployment settings.
    • edit your existing deployments—Takes you to Deployments, where you can make more changes before you publish.

  6. For new deployments:

    • Name your deployment. Use the name to track deployments. For example, you can publish to test and production deployments of your app.

    • Control access to your deployment. Choose who can access this deployment and assign users to roles. You can grant access to everyone in your organization or just the email addresses you add to the list. Learn more about access roles.

      You can give a group in Google Groups access to the deployment and add the group to a role if the group meets the following criteria:

      • They belong to your organization. You cannot add a public group with a googlegroups.com address.
      • Your Google Account has permission to view the group's membership list.

    • (Optional) If you have a Google Analytics account that you want to use for this app, enter your Google Analytics ID.

  7. Click Publish. If your app uses certain Google services, such as Cloud SQL, you might need to authorize the deployment.

After App Maker publishes the deployment, the deployment is listed on the Deployments tab. Each deployment is saved as a revision and you can publish older revisions rather than the latest one. Learn more about revisions.

Deployments don't update as you edit your app. Publish your latest version to test it or give users access to it.

To share your app, copy the deployment URL and provide it to your users or publish it to G Suite Marketplace.

Manage and edit a published app

  1. Click Publish Edit deployments.
  2. Next to the deployment that you want to see or edit, click the Down Arrow .
  3. On the information page, you can get your deployment URL and review your app's OAuth scopes.

  4. You can also take the following actions:

    • To export data from the deployment's database to a sheet, click Export data. Learn more
    • To open server-side log data in a new browser tab, click View logs.
    • To replace the published version with the latest revision of the app, click Republish. Learn more
    • To update deployment access controls, click Edit. Learn more
    • To switch to a different database, click Edit. Learn more
    • To delete a deployment, click Delete. Learn more

OAuth scopes

Your app uses OAuth scopes to request access to Google services data and to act on the behalf of the execution identity (either the account of the app user or the account of the developer who deployed the app). For example, when your app uses the Drive Picker widget and runs as user, your app user must allow the app to view and manage their files in Google Drive to use this capability of the app. Learn more about app user security.

When a user grants an app permission to their Google data, App Maker enforces the sharing settings on that data. For example, when a user grants an app permission to access their Drive files, other users can't access those files through the app unless the file owner shared those files.

As long as an app's OAuth scopes don't change, a user must grant access only once (the first time they open the app).

Your G Suite admin can whitelist each App Maker app for app users.

Revisions

Revisions let you deploy different versions of your app. For example, you can publish a test deployment with your latest changes and publish a production deployment with only tested features. You can also roll back a deployment to a different revision if its current revision doesn’t work as expected.

App maker creates a revision—a specific instance of your app—when you do the following actions:

  • change app settings
  • create, remove, or change a model, script, page, or page fragment

To manage revisions, click Settings Revisions. You can add tags to bookmark changes, preview a revision, download a revision, and publish or revert to a revision. When you revert to a revision, you make that revision the latest version.

To publish a specific revision:

  1. Click Settings Revisions.
  2. Point to the revision you want to publish.
  3. Select a deployment to publish to. You can't publish a specific revision until you publish a deployment.
  4. Click Publish .

Databases and deployments

When an app is set to use the default Cloud SQL instance, all app instances (previews and published deployments) use that Cloud SQL instance but different databases.

To share a database between deployments, use a custom Cloud SQL instance and specify the database. You can have some deployments use the default Cloud SQL instance and other deployments use a custom Cloud SQL instance and database.

You can change the Cloud SQL instance in Deployment Settings Edit. When you change database instances, your data models can become out of sync with the database. App Maker detects when this issue happens and helps you reconcile the differences safely.

Publish an app in the G Suite Marketplace

Your G Suite admin can distribute an app to users in your organization in the G Suite Marketplace.

Before you can publish an app in the G Suite Marketplace:

  • Publish your app in App Maker. Previews of apps can't be distributed in the G Suite Marketplace.
  • Add the G Suite administrator Admin role of the deployment so they can manage your app's settings. Learn how
  • Review the list of assets and prepare them before you start the publishing process.

To publish in the G Suite Marketplace, a G Suite administrator follows the steps in Publish an App Maker app in the G Suite Marketplace.