Skip to main content

Preview vs deployed

Describes NodeGX 0.1.0.

NodeGX has two distinct ways to see your app running, and they answer different questions.

Preview: is it working, right now, as I build it​

The editor has a Preview mode, toggled from the same control as Design mode in the top bar (there's a keyboard shortcut for it too). Flip into Preview and you get your app actually running — a real viewer, connected live to the editor, that reflects the graph exactly as it currently stands, not a snapshot or a rebuild step. You can pick a simulated screen size and zoom level to check a layout at a phone or tablet width, and detach the preview into its own window if you want it alongside the canvas instead of replacing it. For a multi-page app, you can also choose which route the preview loads first. The status bar shows Preview live whenever a viewer is connected.

Preview is for you, while you're building. Nobody else can see it — it only runs inside your own editor.

Deployed: what a real visitor sees​

Deploying turns your project into a real, hosted application other people can open in their own browser, independent of your editor being open at all. NodeGX supports exactly one packaged deployment path today: Docker Compose on a machine you control — reached from Deploy → Self Hosting in the editor. Deploying packages your app together with its backend and an admin dashboard behind a single URL, and from that point on, that URL is what "your app" means to everyone except you.

A couple of things are true of a deploy that are not true of preview, and are worth knowing before you're surprised by them:

  • The backend endpoint is baked in at deploy time. Before you deploy, set Backend Services to the address the deployment will actually be reached at — not your local development address — or the deployed app will load its shell and never fetch any data.
  • A deploy is a snapshot. Once deployed, further edits in the editor don't reach the live site until you deploy again.
  • You can also choose, per project, whether a deploy renders purely in the visitor's browser (the default), renders each page on the server first (better for search engines and public data that changes), or pre-renders every page to static files at build time (best for content that barely changes) — from Deploy → Self Hosting → Rendering mode.

The short version​

Preview answers "does this work" while you're still building it. Deploy answers "can someone else use it" — and is the explicit, separate step that makes your app reachable by anyone who isn't you.