Got my first app into the Marketplace as a private listing. I would like to test the licensing etc on it. In Connect I would use Private Listings for this - but for forge that doesn’t seem to be available?
What’s the alternative? (Apart from launching and testing in production)
Really would to get somebody from Atlassian to help out here. Because I hooked into the marketplace bit - I’m no longer able to get hold of a share link from the developer console. Because of that I can’t really push my app to any type of site that my forge user is not an administrator on…
Is the only resort to blow the app away and wait on pulling the Marketplace until the very end?
Bueller? Bueller?
Hey @danielwester.
I’m on the Forge team and I might be able to help.
Could you describe your case a bit more? What do you specifically need to test?
Several things. 
These are all coming from the workflow we’ve built up from Connect land. Please let me know if there’s a better way of doing this.
We’ve created the marketplace listing page (which is private) and would like to install it on our Jira instances before making the listing public.
This way we can:
Private listings gives us all of this. Right now I’ve managed to get an app listing that I can’t use and because I created the marketplace entry - my developer console listing is locked because the marketplace listing so I can’t install the app in any instances…
Let me know if it would be better to do this troubleshooting/explanation on a call or something.
@danielwester this all makes a lot of sense. I believe that Forge has a similar way to test your app before publishing it to Marketplace. You can enable sharing of your app in Developer Console, copy an installation link and install it to your instance: https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/distribute-your-apps/#start-sharing-your-app
Did you try it? Were there any issues preventing you from using it?
So there are 2 issues with that.
Once you activate the marketplace listing - that capability goes away (at least for me):
Using the CLI won’t work because the app instance that would be staging/production etc for me is not owned by the admin user of the Jira instance (because of the usage of the api tokens - that would be quite scary… ).
Am I correct in thinking that this path isn’t something that the Forge and Marketplace team has considered and is not supported?
Hi @danielwester,
I am afraid private listings for Forge apps are not yet supported and are not currently prioritised. Distribution through the console is disabled for listed (or in the process of being listed) apps to prevent customers from installing an app without understanding and accepting its pricing.
While not ideal, have you considered registering a copy of the app and deploying it to production? As this will technically be a new unlisted app, you will be able to use the distribution link through the developer console. This won’t help with testing the licensing code though, but can help with dogfooding.
I understand this is not a great experience and will be keen to hear how critical are private listings for you and where do they sit (in terms of priority) among your other asks from the Forge team?
Thanks,
Angelina
Yeah. I thought about doing that but since that will then cause me to have a separate version of the manifest and such it brings on the headaches from that (which I was excited about getting away from with Connect). It also adds in the entire thing of that once I have so get things properly set up - I can’t migrate the data between the instances of the app.
Private listings for me is kinda needed for us to be able to test basic licensing situations. (Promo codes can’t let me test somebody evaluating or expired etc).
