Deploying
Make your Flow live and accessible to users.
Deploying
Once you have built and tested your Flow, deploying it makes it available to your end users. This guide covers how to make a version live, what that means, and how to manage your deployed Flows.
Making a version live
Deploying a Flow in FormWise means setting one of your published versions as the live version. Here is how:
- Open your Flow, go to the Publish & Share tab, and click Publish Flow.
- Give your version a name.
- Make sure Make this version live is checked (it is by default).
- Click Publish Flow.
The version you just published is now the one your end users see and interact with.
You can also bring back an earlier version and make it live:
- On the Design tab, select the version you want from the version selector in the toolbar.
- Make an edit on the canvas. Your draft becomes that version's content plus your edit (undo the edit for an exact copy).
- Publish with Make this version live checked.
This replaces your current draft, so publish any draft work you want to keep first. See Versioning.
What deployment means
When a version is live, it is the production version of your Flow. Here is what that means in practice:
- End users see the live version. When someone accesses your Flow through a share link, embed, or Suite, they interact with the live version - not your draft.
- Your draft stays separate. You can keep editing and experimenting in your draft without affecting what users see. Changes to your draft do not go live until you publish a new version and make it live.
- Only one version is live at a time. Publishing a new live version automatically replaces the previous one. The old version stays in your history and can be republished if needed.
Updating a deployed Flow
When you want to improve or change a Flow that is already live:
- Make your changes in the Flow editor. Your draft updates automatically as you work.
- Test your changes using the preview and test suite to make sure everything works.
- On Publish & Share, click Publish Flow and keep Make this version live checked.
- The new version immediately replaces the old one for all users.
The previous live version remains in your version history, so you can roll back at any time by restoring it and publishing it live again.
Sharing after deployment
Once your Flow has a live version, you can share it with users. On the Publish & Share tab, click Share & Embed to get:
- Share Link - A URL that takes users straight to your Flow.
- Embed (iframe) - An iframe snippet you can paste into your website to embed the Flow directly on a page. You can set the embed height.
For more options like bundling Flows together or customizing the experience, see Sharing and Embedding in the Suites section.
If the page that opens your Flow already knows who the visitor is, it can pass those details in the link or from the embedding page so the Flow does not ask again. Form questions with a matching label are filled in automatically. See Session context.
Unpublished Flows
If your Flow does not have a live version, it is not accessible to end users. Unpublished Flows are only visible to you and your team in the FormWise dashboard.
This means you can take your time building and testing without worrying about users seeing a half-finished product. Nothing goes live until you explicitly deploy it.
Best practices
- Always test before deploying. Run your test suite and do a manual preview before making a new version live. A few minutes of testing can save you from publishing a broken Flow.
- Publish a version before deploying changes. This gives you a clean rollback point if the new version does not work as expected.
- Communicate changes to your team. If others rely on the Flow, let them know when you are pushing a new version live - especially if the output format or behavior changes.
- Use versioning to your advantage. If a deployed version causes issues, you can quickly go back to a previous version and publish it live while you investigate.
Next steps
Your Flow is live and ready for users. To learn how to bundle Flows together and customize how they appear, check out the Suites section.