Publish on Quest to a URL
How-to publish your app to a live URL
Last updated
How-to publish your app to a live URL
Last updated
In Quest, you can export code, sync to GitHub and now also publish to a live URL. This is done at the App level so you can export your entire App as a website, depending on how you set up your page routes.
Before you publish your site, you'll need to set up pages for it. Not every component you have may need to be a page, so you will want to set these up manually.
When you're on the top-level layer in the Quest Editor, you'll see on the Route Settings on the right-side panel. There you can set the name of the page, the title and description that search engines will use to both crawl and display as a search result.
Use the link feature and/or bindings to link pages together in Quest.
NOTE: In order to publish your site, you will need to set up a HomePage. Do this just like setting any other page route but keep the path / textfield blank.
You may notice the "Publish" button in the top of the editor. This drop-down is a quick link to the latest published site as well as quick link to the Publish Settings tab. If you have not published the site yet, you will see a message to confirm this.
In the Publish Settings tab, you'll be able to see the domain it is published to, the pages that are set up, publish information like time and last user to publish, as well as the "Publish App" button. The process of publishing can take up to 3 minutes because it is running NPM build each time in the backend.
If you encounter any errors while publishing, a toaster will appear here to tell you what the issue was and where to fix it.
Quest allows you to bring your custom domain to publish to as well. You will need to have purchased this domain from a third-party domain provider such as Squarespace or GoDaddy.
To do this you will need to do complete 2 steps:
Setup & verify your domain with Quest
Choose the new domain from your App and publish to it.
You can get to this first step at the Domains section of your account or through the left-side bar tab under "Workspace" called "My Sites".
Every App gets one seeded domain under the "madewithquest.ai" URL. This is a great way to test things before publishing to a custom domain. In order to set up your custom domain for the first time, press the "Add Domain" button at the top.
This then take you to a new section where you can add your "Site Name", "Domain Name" and "Google Analytics ID".
The Site Name is an internal tag that you will see in the publish drop-down later. It does not need to match your site name but is purely there as a reference inside of Quest for you and your team. For SEO, the site name will be read as the homepage's name along with it's description and you can learn more about that here.
Domain Name is the exact domain name that you intend to use. If you're using "www" be sure to include that in front of the domain name URL. Also be sure to use ".com" or whatever extension you are using instead.
Google Analytics ID is provided by Google in your Google Analytics account. This is not necessary to do and up to you if you'd like to use it. It can also be added at any time later if prefered.
Once you've filled in all the necessary fields, hitting save will bring you to the Verification step.
Next, the Site Activation details will appear. These are the details you’ll want to use to set up a www CNAME on your domain provider’s side.
Login to your domain name provider (Google Domains, GoDaddy, etc.). For most domain providers, navigate to a section called “Manage Domain” or simply “Manage”. Or you may also simply click on your domain name from the list in your account. Then go to a section called “Manage DNS records” or something similar. Create a new CNAME record or update an existing record with the values from your Quest account - similar to the screenshot above.
When you have saved the details on your domain provider’s side, you can verify if your domain has been activated in Quest by pressing the “Verify” button in your Quest site page.. Your domain provider may say it can take 24-48 hours for this change to take effect. It generally takes about 1 hour, sometimes less. Once your site is verified, SSL will automatically begin to process and should take no longer than a minute or two.
You will also see the site status update. SSL will automatically update after that as well.
Note: Some domains will automatically append your original domain name to the end of the domain name when you paste your CNAME Destination / Target. An example of this is with Google Domains where you must add a period “.” to the end of the input field in order to stop this. Be sure the domain name is exactly the same as what is copied and pasted from Quest with the only possible exception of a period at the end such as: “ssl-na1.madewithquest.ai.”
Individual Domain Provider CNAME reference links For further help, here’s some references from some top domain providers that might help from where you purchased your domain name. Google Help - Verify your domain
Once everything is verified, you can now use the domain to publish to. Similar to publishing to the seeded domain earlier in this doc, you would go to the Publish tab icon in the left-side bar. Here you'll now see the new custom domain option in the "Publish to" drop-down. You will need to finally publish your App here see this take place and for the new page URLs to be live at your custom domain.
NOTE: You can only publish to 1 sub-domain provide right now.
