Publish your New Relic application

Course

This lesson is part of a course that teaches you how to build a New Relic application from the ground up. If you haven't already, check out the course introduction.

Each lesson in the course builds upon the last, so make sure you've completed the last lesson, Describe your app for the catalog, before starting this one.

In the last lesson, you created catalog information for the A/B test app you've been building throughout this course. Now, it's time to publish your app to the Instant Observability catalog and submit those catalog details.

Versions and tags

Publishing an application requires two key pieces of information:

version
tag

An application's version identifies the code it contains and is stored in the Nerdpack's root-level package.json file. Every time you modify code in your Nerdpack and are ready to release it, you'll update the version in package.json. For example, if you fix some bugs in the first major version your application code, you might publish the changes under version 1.0.1.

An app version's tags describe its state. For example, version 0.0.1 of a work-in-progress application might be published with a DEV tag to indicate that it's in development.

Tip

There are some rules governing how you can use tags and you can read about those in our tags documentation.

Publish your first application

Step 1 of 7

Change to the publish/ab-test directory of the coursework repository:

bash

$cd nru-programmability-course/publish/ab-test

This directory contains the code that we expect your application to have at this point in the course. By navigating to the correct directory at the start of each lesson, you leave your custom code behind, thereby protecting yourself from carrying incorrect code from one lesson to the next.

Step 2 of 7

Navigate to the root of your Nerdpack at nru-programmability-course/publish/ab-test.

Step 3 of 7

Generate your own app UUID:

bash

$nr1 nerdpack:uuid -gf

The UUID is used to identify your app in the New Relic app registry. Because you're using code that we developed for this course, an application with the existing UUID already exists in the registry. By generating your own, you're now able to publish this application.

Technical detail

The UUID also ties your app to your account and, therefore, allows the application to make Nerdgraph requests on behalf of the account that installed it.

Step 4 of 7

In package.json, set version to 1.0.0:

{
  "private": true,
  "name": "ab-test",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "nr1 nerdpack:serve",
    "test": "exit 0"
  },
  "nr1": {
    "uuid": "2d923ba6-d231-4dd3-830f-b1923577a422"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "prop-types": "^15.6.2",
    "react": "^16.6.3",
    "react-dom": "^16.6.3"
  },
  "browserslist": ["last 2 versions", "not ie < 11", "not dead"]
}

New Relic uses semantic versioning and, under this convention, 1.0.0 signals the first major release. Now, you're ready to publish!

Step 5 of 7

Replace all instances of <YOUR NEW RELIC ACCOUNT ID> and <YOUR NEW RELIC ENTITY GUID> in your project with your actual New Relic account ID and entity GUID, respectively.

Step 6 of 7

Publish your New Relic application:

bash

$nr1 nerdpack:publish -t DEV

That's it! You published your application to New Relic's registry. The -t parameter specifies a tag for your published version. Among other logs, you should see the following confirmation in your console:

bash

Publishing Nerdpack AbTest (9da77738-9cf6-43c7-9ba0-e3a8c6ac7380)
 ✔  Nerdpack published successfully!
 ✔  Tagged 9da77738-9cf6-43c7-9ba0-e3a8c6ac7380 version 1.0.0 as DEV.

For now, you've tagged the 1.0.0 release as DEV because it's still a work in progress.

Step 7 of 7

View your app's registry information:

bash

$nr1 nerdpack:info
Id: 9da77738-9cf6-43c7-9ba0-e3a8c6ac7380
Region: us
Account ID: 123456
Local version: 1.0.0
Subscription Model: OWNER_AND_ALLOWED
Version Count: 4
Version  Date           Tags
-------  -------------  ------
1.0.0    5 minutes ago  DEV

The results of this command detail the information stored in New Relic's registry for your application, including its UUID, version, and account ID.

View your application in Instant Observability

Now that your application is published and tagged, you can view it in the Instant Observability catalog.

Step 1 of 3

Go to New Relic. Notice that you're not using the ?nerdpacks=local querystring parameter. You don't need it anymore because you're not serving your app locally.

Step 2 of 3

From the homepage, navigate to Add data in the top navigation bar:

Select Apps & Visualizations:

From here, you can see your application among the resources:

Your app in catalog

Notice that this is different than when you locally served your app. Local apps and published apps you're subscribed to show under Your apps in the Apps overlay instead.

Step 3 of 3

Click on your app to see more details:

App details

Notice the release date and app version. This page should show the information you created in the last lesson. It doesn't yet, because you haven't submitted that information to the catalog, and publishing your app doesn't do that for you.

Submit catalog information

Even though you've published your application, there are some things that the catalog doesn't know about. These are the descriptions, screenshots, and metadata you created in the last lesson. nr1 catalog is used to submit and view this information.

Step 1 of 3

Submit your catalog information:

bash

$nr1 catalog:submit
Uploading screenshots from nru-programmability-course/publish/ab-test...
 ✔  Screenshots uploaded from: nru-programmability-course/publish/ab-test
 ✔  Updated metadata for AbTest 1.0.0

If everything goes right, you should see a success message notifying you that the screenshots and metadata were updated.

You may, however, get an error when submitting this information to the catalog:

bash

Uploading screenshots...
 ›   Error: 1 error while updating AbTest 1.0.0
 ›
 ›   Invalid Version: Nerdpack version 1.0.0 not found. Have you run `nr1 nerdpack:publish` yet?
 ›   Code: UNKNOWN

If you do, try again in a minute or two. It can take a few seconds for the catalog to update with the new version of your application.

If that doesn't work, make sure you published your app with nr1 nerdpack:publish.

Step 2 of 3

View your catalog information:

bash

$nr1 catalog:info
AbTest (Nerdpack):
    categoryTerms.0: browser agent
    description: Nerdpack ab-test
    details: Display test data for our newsletter subscription A/B test
    displayName: AbTest
    keywords.0: a/b test
    icon.url: https://nr3.nr-ext.net/artifact-index-production/a685fec2-29fb-40b0-9f65-4178...
    previews.0.url: https://application-catalog-production.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nerdpacks/a...
    releaseDate: 2021-03-12T15:46:09.600138Z
    repository: https://github.com/newrelic-experimental/nru-programmability-course
    tagline: Win @ newsletter subscriptions
    version: 1.0.0
    whatsNew.changes: Initial release! Includes:
    - A variety of charts for understanding the test r...
    whatsNew.version: 1.0.0
AbTestLauncher (Launcher):
    description: Describe me
    displayName: AbTestLauncher
    icon.url: https://nr3.nr-ext.net/artifact-index-production/a685fec2-29fb-40b0-9f65-4178...
AbTestNerdlet (Nerdlet):
    displayName: AbTestNerdlet
    supportedEntityTypes.mode: NONE

All the information from catalog shows here.

Step 3 of 3

View your app:

Your app with metadata

Click on the app to see more:

Your app details

You see the screenshots added to your launcher or Nerdlet under What's inside:

What's inside preview

Here, you see app details, a documentation tab, release notes, and screenshots.

Update your version tag

Your app looks great in the Instant Observability catalog, complete with metadata, images, and documentation. Before, you tagged the app as DEV because all of the information wasn't ready for public consumption. Now, it is. It's time to update your version tag.

Step 1 of 2

Update your 1.0.0 app version from DEV to STABLE:

bash

$nr1 nerdpack:tag -t STABLE
 ✔  Tagged 9da77738-9cf6-43c7-9ba0-e3a8c6ac7380 version 1.0.0 as STABLE.

Without specifying a version, nr1 uses the version specified in package.json. You can specify a version with the -V command. Learn more about nerdpack:tag with the nr1 nerdpack:tag --help command.

Step 2 of 2

View your app information:

bash

$nr1 nerdpack:info
Id: 9da77738-9cf6-43c7-9ba0-e3a8c6ac7380
Region: us
Account ID: 123456
Local version: 1.0.0
Subscription Model: OWNER_AND_ALLOWED
Version Count: 1
Version  Date           Tags
-------  -------------  ------
1.0.0    30 minutes ago  STABLE

The app is now tagged with STABLE, indicating it's ready for public use.

Technical detail

Even though the app is ready for public use, it's still only visible to users of your account. Other accounts can't see apps created by other private accounts unless those apps are added to the public Instant Observability catalog.

Now that your app is published and its metadata is submitted, you can subscribe your account to the app from Instant Observability. In the next lesson, you'll learn the ways to subscribe and unsubscribe to your new application.

Course

This lesson is part of a course that teaches you how to build a New Relic application from the ground up. Continue on to the next lesson: Subscribe to your New Relic application.