Update and promote

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Every publish is two actions. Update builds; Promote publishes. They are separate so that you always get to look at the site before the public does.

This is also why a Confluence edit never reaches the live site on its own.

#Update

Builds the whole site and uploads it to a private staging preview. Progress runs Queued, Preparing, Processing N of M pages, Finalizing, Complete.

Site overview for Capable Help Center with a Preview Ready badge and a staging address, and a Deployment card showing a staging row with a Promote button and a production row reading Not published yet
After an update the staging preview is ready to review while production is still empty, so nothing is public yet.

  • The staging address carries a random token, and a new token is minted every deploy, so old preview links stop working.

  • Staging always ships a disallow-all robots.txt, so search engines never index a preview.

  • The preview is kept for 90 days, with a warning from 14 days out.

  • The live address is not touched.

#Promote

Copies every staging file onto production. It confirms first, naming the live address.

  • Any live file the new build does not contain is deleted.

  • Sitemaps are rewritten to the live address, or to your custom domain.

  • The disallow-all robots.txt is replaced with a permissive one.

  • The CDN cache is cleared.

#Keeping track

The Overview panel tells you where you stand: "N pages changed since last deployment", a link to review the changed pages, and either "Preview matches Confluence" or "Preview is N changes behind Confluence".

Sites panel showing a banner reading Building staging preview, please wait, and a progress card reading Processing 36 of 400 pages with Preparing, Processing 9 percent and Finalizing stages and a Canc
A running build reports the stage it has reached and how many pages it has processed, and can be cancelled part way.

#A few things worth knowing

  • A staging preview that expires cannot be promoted. Rebuild with Update.

  • Deploys are capped at 12 per hour per site and 12 per tenant, and an export counts against that.

  • Only one deploy can run per site at a time.

Update builds. Promote publishes. Neither happens by itself.