Web flow

Publishing your web app

What published app does

When you publish an app in Emergent, the platform provisions production infrastructure and makes your application live at a public, permanent URL. Unlike the preview environment (which spins up on demand and shuts down after inactivity), a published app runs 24/7 and can handle real user traffic.

Coming from another platform? Publishing is the same thing as deploying - what other tools call deploy, deployment, or redeploy, Emergent calls Publish and Re-publish.

Each published app:

  • Creates a stable, shareable URL (e.g. 
    https://your-app-name.emergent.host
    )
  • Provisions serverless compute, storage and any required services
  • Runs health checks and keeps the app online continuously
  • Routes traffic through a CDN for low-latency delivery

First-time published app

The first published app of an app can take ~15 minutes while infrastructure is provisioned and your code is built. Subsequent updates are typically faster.

Cost of a published app

A published app costs 50 credits per month at the Starter tier (ranging from 50 to 1,100 credits/month depending on your publishing tier) while it remains live. This covers:

  • Compute and storage for hosting
  • Network egress and CDN delivery
  • Health monitoring and logging
  • Automatic scaling within platform limits

Note

Credits are deducted monthly from your account balance while the app is published. If you shut down the published app, billing stops immediately. See Managing credit usage for details on topping up.

Sharing your published app

Once published app completes, share the public URL with anyone. No authentication is required unless your app implements its own login flow.

Common use cases:

  • Share with friends or beta testers for feedback
  • Embed in a portfolio or showcase
  • Connect a custom domain (if supported by your plan)
  • Use in production for low-to-moderate traffic

Tip

The published URL is permanent as long as the app remains live. You can re-publish updates at any time without changing the URL.

Shutting down a published app

You can shut down a published app at any time from the workspace. This:

  • Stops the app and releases infrastructure
  • Immediately halts the monthly credit charge
  • Preserves your code and project history

To re-publish later, simply click Publish again from the same project.

Warning

Shutting down a published app does not delete any databases or external services your app may use (e.g. MongoDB). If you want to remove data, manually delete those resources separately. See Database (MongoDB) for details.

Monitoring a published app

Emergent provides basic monitoring tools to check the health and performance of your live app.

Checking uptime

From the workspace, the publish status indicator shows:

  • Green (Live) - app is healthy and responding
  • Yellow (Degraded) - partial outage or slow response
  • Red (Down) - app is unreachable

Info

The platform runs automated health checks every few minutes. If your app becomes unresponsive, you'll see a status change in the workspace and may receive an alert (depending on your notification settings).

Viewing logs

Click Logs in the published app panel to stream real-time output from your app. Logs capture:

  • HTTP requests and responses
  • Console output (
    console.log
    , 
    print
    , etc.)
  • Uncaught exceptions and stack traces
  • Framework-level warnings

Use logs to debug unexpected behavior or trace user-reported issues.

Production errors

If your app crashes or throws unhandled errors, Emergent surfaces them in the Errors tab. Each entry includes:

  • Timestamp and affected route or endpoint
  • Full stack trace
  • Request context (URL, headers, user agent)

Proactive debugging

Check the Errors tab regularly, especially after pushing updates. Catching issues early helps maintain a smooth experience for your users.

For performance issues (slow load times, cold starts), see App slow, crashing or cold-starting.

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