Preview & Publishing
In one minute
Section titled “In one minute”Previewing is trying your assistant yourself, as you are building it. Publishing is putting a finished version in front of the public.
| Preview | Published | |
|---|---|---|
| Who can open it | Signed-in members of your organisation only | Anyone with the link, within the channel’s access controls |
| What they see | Your latest saved settings, including unfinished work | A frozen copy (a snapshot) from the moment you published |
| Who can do it | Any member who can view the assistant | Organisation admins and the project’s owner |
| Safety check | None: it is your own draft | Instructions are checked before anything goes live |
| Costs | Real AI usage, same as live | Real AI usage |
| Use it for | Testing a change, demoing to your team, QA | Your website, kiosk, LMS, campaign links: anything customers use |
Preview
Section titled “Preview”A preview link is your private, internal way to try the assistant exactly as it is configured right now.
URL shape: /chat/<projectId> (a long internal ID, not a friendly name).
Who can preview
Section titled “Who can preview”Opening a preview requires being signed in as a member of the organisation that owns the assistant, with that organisation selected and a role that may view assistants. Anyone else, including a logged-out visitor who was sent the link, gets a permission error.
This holds for everything behind the preview too: the chat and voice connections that serve the unpublished settings refuse anyone who is not a member of the organisation. Treat preview links as internal QA tools, never as something to hand to customers.
A preview can only be shown on Ragtime itself (for example inside the dashboard). It cannot be embedded on another website; embed a published channel instead.
What preview shows
Section titled “What preview shows”- Always the latest saved settings. Preview serves the editable assistant, not a published snapshot. Every setting you save shows up immediately. That is the whole point: test before you publish.
- Through the default preview channel. The dashboard Preview button renders through your project’s default preview channel, so you see how the assistant appears on that channel, including any custom HTML template, without publishing. Preview traffic is not counted in the per-channel analytics.
- With your test values. Preview fills in the Preview Test Value of each external variable (Deployment → Embedding), with no request signing needed, so you can try personalised behaviour before your website sends real values.
- With a page events tester. If you have declared page events (Actions → Page events), a Page events button in the preview lets you send them by hand, the way your page will, and shows whether each one was accepted.
What preview still costs
Section titled “What preview still costs”A preview conversation runs the same model, voice and avatar pipeline as production. Preview sessions use your budget and show up in your organisation’s cost tracking (Dashboard → Billing). Preview is free of audience, not free of cost: an avatar preview uses avatar minutes like the real thing.
Preview requires a channel
To use the dashboard Preview button, your project must have at least one channel. The first channel you create becomes the default preview channel.
Publishing
Section titled “Publishing”Publishing is the step that makes an assistant reachable by the public.
Who can publish
Section titled “Who can publish”Organisation admins and the project’s owner can publish, refresh and unpublish. Other members can build and preview, but not put changes live.
The safety check
Section titled “The safety check”Before anything goes live, Ragtime checks the assistant’s custom instructions, opening instructions and the sentences of any page events for two things only: text that tries to switch off the platform’s own rules (for example “ignore your instructions” or “reveal your system prompt”), and harmful content. It does not judge wording, tone or quality.
If something is flagged, publishing stops and you are shown the exact lines to change. The same check runs when you refresh a published version, so there is no way to put unchecked instructions live.
What happens when you publish
Section titled “What happens when you publish”Publishing creates a snapshot: a frozen copy of the assistant’s persona, safety and knowledge settings, interaction settings (including page events), actions, enabled flows, conversation stages, the compiled system prompt, and the current set of linked knowledge libraries. Each publish bumps a version number (v1, v2, …); the newest active snapshot is what the public sees.
The important consequence:
- Public links serve the snapshot, not your live edits. After you publish, you can keep editing safely. Nobody sees those changes until you publish again (a new version) or refresh the current snapshot in place.
- The first publish asks you to choose a slug: a short, URL-friendly name (3 to 80 characters, lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens). It becomes part of every public URL, so pick it deliberately; it is reused on every later publish.
What a published link is
Section titled “What a published link is”Once published, the assistant is served at friendly, public URLs built from your org slug, project slug and a channel slug:
/chat/<orgSlug>/<projectSlug>/<channelSlug>- Public. No login is required (unlike preview). Anyone with the link can open it, subject to the channel’s own access controls: IP allow-list, LMS-only launch, and sign-in where you require it.
- Embeddable only where you allow it. Other websites can show the assistant in a frame only if they are listed under Allowed Domains (Deployment → Embedding). With none listed, it cannot be embedded anywhere; opening the link directly still works. A site that is not listed shows a message naming itself and this setting.
- Signed when you ask for it. With request signing on (Deployment → Embedding → Security), any link that passes values to the assistant (external variables, or injected instructions) must be signed by your server. Injected instructions are only accepted on signed requests.
- Attributed to a channel. Because a published link always points at a channel, its conversations feed the per-channel analytics, the channel breakdown and the campaign meter.
- Stable. The URL does not change when you republish; only the snapshot behind it does.
Unpublishing
Section titled “Unpublishing”Unpublishing deactivates the snapshot so the public URLs stop serving, while keeping the slug and history so you can publish again later.
Keeping published content current
Section titled “Keeping published content current”Remember the snapshot model: edits are invisible to the public until you publish again (new version) or refresh the active snapshot. Build a habit of previewing, then publishing, so you always know exactly what the world is seeing.