Publish your bot
Once you have built a bot and you feel it is ready to be shared with the public, you can publish it to an engine. This makes your bot available as a service that can be accessed via HTTPS. The SDK's and connectors documented in this section interact with the engine and help you make your bot come alive on various channels.
Publish environments
For a solution to be published in Teneo, it needs to get one or more publish environments. A publish environment specifies various details of the server your solution will be published to, like the type of server (development, QA, production) and, quite importantly, its URL.
Publish your 'Latest' bot
To publish your bot, proceed as follows:
- Open the 'SOLUTION' tab in the solution's window.
- Select 'Publish'.
- Click the 'Manage' button and in the drop-down you will see a lot of different alternatives. Locate the 'Latest' section and choose 'Publish'.
You might see a warning saying 'Publish to 'Default env' stopped with warnings. '
This is nothing to worry about; the warning is shown when you publish your solution for the first time or when you have made certain global changes. To proceed, just check the checkbox 'Perform full application deployment on Try again' and click the 'Try again' button.
The publication may take a couple of minutes; the video below is sped up slightly. When it has finished, you'll receive a confirmation pop-up.
Publish your 'Stable' bot
If you are using Version Flags in your solution, proceed as follows to publish your 'Stable' version:
- Open the 'SOLUTION' tab in the solution's window.
- Select 'Publish' in the left sidebar.
- Click the 'Manage' button and in the drop-down you will see a lot of different alternatives. Locate the 'Stable' section and choose 'Publish'.
Publish through API
To publish your bot through the API, proceed as follows:
- Login to Studio with the following request auth/login. Capture the token and make sure you use it in every call (alternatively use the Authorize button at the top).
- If you are a member of multiple accounts run the following customers.
- Now switch over to the correct account, switchCustomer.
- Return the Publishing enviroment ID, copy it as it will be needed for the next step. getPublishEnvironments.
- Finally, publish your bot, using the ID from the previous step beginPublish.
- Now lets return the results and ensure our bot is published, getWebappPublishResult.
Hello World!
Time to meet your bot! Click 'Open' in the publication confirmation pop-up. If you have already closed it, you can simply click the URL that is shown in the 'Publish' window instead. This will open a Teneo Web Chat web page where you can try out your bot.
Different publish environments
In addition to the features above, a license in Teneo also includes different setups for publish environments. These are known as the three stages of a project: Development, Quality Assurance (QA), and Production. The user has the option to set up these publish environments to make sure the project is running smoothly during the different stages.
Best practices
Publishing is a resource-heavy task that should be done in different stages of a project. In Teneo, an Enterprise license includes three different setups for publishing environments, named after the three different stages of a project: Development, Staging (QA), and Production.
In addition to these three publish environments, Teneo also allows the user to test and debug the current solution using the Tryout panel. We recommend for the user to first test a solution's behavior and functionality in Tryout, followed by running an auto-test on the entire solution as most of the issues can be captured at this level.
Once you see the tests running fine on Tryout, and the auto-test results are returning a perfect score, it is time to publish your bot in the Development environment, which is shown above: Publish your bot.
If you run into errors when testing the solution, note them down and avoid republishing until the test is fully completed. Once the errors are known, go back to the Solution and make the necessary adjustments before confirming that it is working in Tryout.
To summarize:
- Make sure all Production publications are first tested thoroughly on your Test Environment.
- There is both a Development and a Staging (QA) environment where you can test the published Solution. Staging (QA) is especially critical as it duplicates the Production delivery server setup, allowing for more accurate testing of how the published bot will behave on the live site.
- Restrict publications to ideally no more than two times per hour. This allows all changes to filter through as well as recovery of cache and memory heaps.
- Do not attempt repeated publications after a failure until the issue is resolved, as repeated failed publications can eat up system resources.
- Publications to the Production Environment should ideally be done when there is low traffic, especially if extensive solution/resource changes are involved.
- If there is a Web Interface deployment, changes must be tested through that as well to check that the bot's responses, etc., are working as expected.