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Alpha Cloud - Alpha Anywhere Developer's Guide

Managing Publish Profiles and Publishing

You can also manage your cloud publish profile and publish to Alpha Cloud from the common dialogs used for publishing from Alpha Anywhere.

Creating a Cloud Publish Profile
Publish Your Web Project

Creating a Cloud Publish Profile

1. Begin by clicking on the web control panel toolbar icon labeled "Publish" to open the "Publish Web Project" dialog.
   
   
   
2. Click the Add/Edit Profile icon by the profile names to display a the current profiles.
   
   
   
3. Click the button entitled "Add New Profile" to create a new profile.
   
   
   
4. Click the Alpha Cloud radio button, then click the button labeled "Finish".




5. Depending on how many Alpha Cloud subscriptions and accounts you are authorized to manage, and the preferences you have set, a different dialog will be displayed.

   • If you have a single subscription and account, the basic publish dialog below will be displayed. Complete the entries in the dialog as described previously in Basic Publish Settings.

     After completing the initial publish settings and clicking OK, you will be prompted to name your new profile.

     
     
     
     

   • If you have permission to manage multiple subscriptions and accounts, follow the instructions in Advanced Publishing Support in Alpha Anywhere.

     After completing the initial publish settings and clicking OK, you will be prompted to name your new profile.

     
     
     
     


6. Give your new profile a name and click the OK button.



7. To return to the settings dialog later, select your new profile on the Web Project Profiles dialog, and click the button to the right of the entry labeled "Publish settings" under the property group "Publish to Alpha Cloud".

Publish Your Web Project

Once you have created your publish profile, you can use that profile again and again to publish new versions of your web project.

1. Begin by clicking on the web control panel toolbar icon labeled "Publish" to open the "Publish Web Project" dialog.






2. At the Alpha Anywhere Publish Web Project dialog, select your Alpha Cloud publish profile, make any changes to settings and click the "Publish" button.






3. Alpha Anywhere will gather up the components required and display the Files to be Published dialog (Note: You can check "Don't show this list again" to skip this step in the future).

   click the OK button to proceed with publishing your web project to the cloud.







4. The Alpha Cloud Publish Progress dialog will be displayed while your web project is being published and deployed on the Alpha Cloud.







5. After a successful publish, the Application Published to Alpha Cloud dialog below will be displayed. The dialog will automatically update showing you the current status as your application is being deployed.

   
   

   Follow the instructions on the page:

   
   

   For example you can click on the link to go directly to your deployed application. This will close the dialog.

   
   

   You can also copy the link to your application to the clipboard and paste it into a browser later.

   
   

   Note: Keep in mind that if a new server instance must be started, you may have to wait a while to access your application. If you deploy in public tenancy, your application may be available in a matter of seconds.







6. Click close on the Application Published to Alpha Cloud dialog to return to the web control panel.

This Completes all steps.

Fast Publishing (Build 9179)

Publishing a web site to Alpha Cloud or to IIS can take some time. During the development phase of an application it may be desirable to have a faster [ui:design-test cycle]. This is possible using a new type of publishing profile - the Fast Publish profile, introduced in v4.6.5.5.

Fast Publishing works as follows: The initial publish (called the base publish) of your website is done the normal way (using your IIS or Alpha Cloud publishing profile - which must be configured to allow Fast Publishing as described below). After the base publish, any time you make a change to a component or other file in your project, you can publish the changed file (or all changed files), using a Fast Publishing publishing profile.

Fast Publishing publishes the edited files to an AWS S3 bucket (which you specify when you set up your Fast Publishing profile). Publishing to a S3 bucket is generally much faster than publishing to IIS or Alpha Cloud. At run-time Alpha Anywhere will retrieve files from the S3 bucket in preference to the website's webroot folder.

Every time you do a new base publish the files in the S3 bucket are cleared out.

1. To enable Fast Publishing when you define an IIS or Alpha Cloud publishing profile, locate Fast Publishing in the Web Project Profiles properties. This property will only be available if the profile was created as an Alpha Cloud or IIS profile. Check the box to enable Fast Publishing and reveal child properties of that section.

   

2. You will then need to specify the Storage Connection String name for your S3 bucket and optionally the name of a folder in that bucket where edited files will be published.

   

3. For each IIS or Alpha Cloud publishing profile for which Fast Publishing is enabled, you will need to define a matching Fast Publish publishing profile that uses the same storage connection string and folder.

   TIP: You can have Alpha Anywhere create the necessary Fast Publishing profiles automatically when you save your publishing profiles.

   

Limitations: If you add a new file to your website after the initial base publish and you publish that file using a Fast Publish publishing profile, you will be able to reference this file when you run your application as long as your website does not use the Alpha Anywhere security framework. However, if your web site uses the security framework, then you will need to do a new base publish before this new file can be referenced.

Fast Publishing Video

In this video we show how you can perform Fast Publishes to an IIS or Alpha Cloud web site to test changes you have made to your components and pages. Fast Publish is generally significantly faster than a full publish.

Date: April 2, 2024

Watch Video - Using the Fast Publish Feature to Publish Changes to Files in your Web Site

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