Syncing Changes
[TODO] Explain how BPFS works and how to download and sync changes with the source code
🔧 Maintenance
Once your bot is deployed, the good part is that you (and non-technical team members) can still make changes to the bot from the dashboard. This is a major advantage of Botpress, and this is made possible by our built-in versioning system.
Some of the bot's behavior is determined by the content coming from the files (Content / Forms, Flows).
For your convenience Botpress provides the GUI tools to edit these files while in development. We also provide the same tools in production, but there's a caveat. If we would write the same change to the server's file system, they could easily be lost due to the nature of ephemeral server instances (when the new version of the bot is deployed, the old server instance may be shut down by the cloud hosting platform).
To address this issue, BPFS gives you the Ghost Content feature. In production, your changes are saved to the database which is persisted between deployments. But how do you get these changes back to your bot's codebase?
To do so, you run a special command from your bot folder, ./node_modules/.bin/botpress pull https://yourbot.url
. This will fetch the updated content from the server, apply it to the local file system, and also record the revision IDs in a special file.
The synchronization is finalized after these updated files are redeployed.