Managing releases of your bot

This article discusses best practices for managing releases of Hangouts Chat bots. The specific recommendation depends on which kind of endpoint you are using for your bot:

• HTTP
• Apps Script
• Cloud Pub/Sub

Regardless of which endpoint type you use, each instance of a Hangouts Chat bot is backed by a single Google Cloud project. We recommend the following practices:

• Create a different Cloud project for each type of release (such as dev, test, and production)
• Name your bot appropriately
• Point each bot to different endpoints, each representing a different release.

You may find it helpful to badge each bot icon with different symbols to quickly differentiate different releases of your bot.

HTTP bots

For an HTTP bot, you might create three Cloud projects: one pointing to HEAD, for quick iterative development testing, and two more to represent test and production builds.

Project	Release	Bot name	Bot URL
1	HEAD	Task Bot (HEAD)	http://example.com/api/mybot/head
2	Test	Task Bot (Test)	http://example.com/api/mybot/test
3	Production	Task Bot	http://example.com/api/mybot/

To move a bot down the release cycle, just push the previous release to the existing URL.

For example, suppose you have finished testing a bot at http://example.com/api/mybot/test. To release this bot to production, just push it to http://example.com/api/mybot/.

Cloud Pub/Sub bots

For Cloud Pub/Sub bots, we recommend the same deployment model as for HTTP bots, with the following addition:

• Each bot release should use its own Cloud Pub/Sub topic.

Apps Script bots

Each instance of an Apps Script bot has its own deployment ID and version number.

The HEAD deployment always points to version 0. Each additional deployment ID maps to a different version of your Apps Script bot. To manage releases of these bots, create a different Cloud project for each release and then map each deployment ID to the corresponding Cloud project. See the table below for details.

Project	Release	Bot name	Deployment ID	Apps Script version
1	HEAD	Task Bot (HEAD)	{Head deployment ID}	0
2	Test	Task Bot (Test)	{deployment ID 2}	2
3	Production	Task Bot	{deployment ID 3}	3

To move an Apps Script bot down the release cycle, you can create a new version by creating a new deployment and choosing New as the version number. You can then update the production bot with this new deployment ID.

Warning: You can use the HEAD deployment for simple testing during development. But bots with HEAD deployments cannot be shared across a domain, and cannot be accessed by users unless they have read access to your script. Therefore for general testing and release you must create a versioned deployment.