Publishing

Until a site publishes, its visitors see the working branch: every saved edit is live at once, which is right for a site being built. Publishing separates the two: authors keep working on main, and the site reads publish, where only what was explicitly published exists.

What Publish does

Pressing Publish on a page copies that node, its translations and — with Publish with children — its subtree from the working branch to the publish branch, and records who published what. The page’s status shows published, modified since publish or unpublished; Unpublish removes it from the publish branch without touching the working copy. A publish can be scheduled for a time, and a scheduled publish can be cancelled. Publishing runs through the same automation engine as everything else, so a four-eyes approval before anything goes live is a human-in-the-loop task on the publish flow, not a feature to build.

Everything a page references must be published too: its images (the assets workspace), its brand, the pages its links point at. Publishing a page offers to include its references; the header, footer and brand are published once and rarely again.

What the site does

One environment variable:

RAISIN_LIVE_BRANCH=publish

The middleware reads it for every request without a preview session. The editor’s preview keeps reading main. Because a branch is repository-wide, a site reading publish sees an unpublished story as no story — so the first publish is the whole story with children, the brand and the assets, and only then the switch.

Writes never depend on the read branch: a form submission is created on the working branch, where the automations that handle it run.

Caching and the live branch

A published branch changes only when someone publishes, which makes it safe to cache aggressively: the Astro example caches the chrome for a minute, and a CDN in front of the site can cache pages by URL. Studio purges that cache when a publish completes, so visitors see the change at once; Caching and purge covers the setup. A page with time-based variant rules is the exception and says so (hasTimeRules). The working branch, in contrast, changes on every keystroke, and the editor’s preview must never be cached.