App deployment
Quickbase offers a range of deployment options to match your organization’s needs:
- By default, changes made to Quickbase apps are live immediately, eliminating the need to manage deployments at all.
- A sandbox is available, allowing you to test changes to individual apps before publishing them.
- You can also group related apps and pipelines together into a solution and use APIs to manage changes to these groups of related components together as a single unit.
These options are frequently used together, with more business-critical apps using our sandbox or solution APIs and lower-tier apps being updated live.
No matter how you deploy changes, no separate web hosting or CI/CD tools are required.
Sandbox
Quickbase’s sandbox is a lightweight change control mechanism that operates on a single app. App builders can use it to make, test, and review changes to an app before publishing to all users. IT and business developers can work together to set up a change management process using Sandbox that minimizes risk.
Deploying changes to an app using the sandbox is managed through the UI. (For more information on Sandbox, see our Development page.)
Solution APIs
Solution APIs are the core of Application Lifecycle Management in Quickbase. They allow you to create environments where you can manage changes to a solution as a single unit. This helps to ensure consistent state across related components, like related apps and workflows, all while keeping in compliance with your app development and data governance policies.
Deploying changes to a set of related apps and pipelines (we call such sets a Solution) via Solution APIs is done by invoking the Update a Solution endpoint. You can also automate this by integrating with your CI/CD tool of choice, like Github. A template for a Quickbase app to manage these deployments more easily is also available in our app exchange. (For more information, see the Solution APIs overview in our Help Center.)
The payload for these powerful APIs uses Quickbase Language (QBL), providing a human-readable, textual description for app and pipeline schema. Adding QBL support for all schema objects is a work in progress, and we are committed to continually expanding QBL support until all schema objects are covered. (For a list of schema objects currently supported in QBL, please see our help article.)