Late last year we announced the release of the developer console, the one-stop shop for our developer community to manage their Forge apps. Today we are expanding on the capabilities by introducing a lightweight way to share your Forge app with users for testing and internal usage. While we’re working to get Forge apps on Marketplace, you can start distributing your apps right now!
We want developers to have complete control over when and how they share their apps. Which is why, as part of this release, we’ve changed the distribution status of all existing apps, and newly created apps, to ‘Not sharing’.
What does this mean?
To share their Forge apps, developers will need to enable sharing in the developer console.
For existing Forge apps: until now, both app developers and users were able to grant OAuth 2.0 consent. Following this change, users won’t be able to grant consent until the developer changes the distribution status to ‘Sharing’.
We want your feedback
As always, we are super interested in any feedback you can share on what has been built so far, so feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or DM me.
Can you clarify some details on cross-product apps:
The app distribution allows to mark a single app as cross-product, resulting in one install for both Jira and Confluence - which is great
However, as for the pending Marketplace integration, we got the impression that that will not support cross-product apps due to separate constraints there!
Is that still true/to be expected, i.e. will we have to split our cross-product app offerings for marketplace integration later on?
If that is the case, can you expand on the technical implications of such a split? (E.g. will we have to provide separate app manifests to ensure that they only declare modules/scopes for the respective target product?)
Apart from distribution not working for us at all (see earlier JulianWolf post - I still get the same errors), and thus not being able to test this, I have some more feedback based on the announcement and docs:
This, along with the docs, point to sharing only being possible for production deployments. While better than no sharing at all, this contradicts the “share your Forge app with users for testing” aspect of the whole feature - if we want to test new features of an already deployed and distributed app, we’d need to be able to share at least a staging deployment as well, in order to not impact users of the production version.
Hi @hopel, this is a fair point and I am grateful that you have shared it. We are assessing potential solutions to this problem, however we can’t commit to a timeframe at this time. Will keep you updated.
Hi @hopel, on the topic of testing a new version of an already distributed app, I am curious to understand (if we assume that you are able to share a staging deployment of an app), do you see a need to share that version with customers who already have the original version installed on their site?
Good question - probably not that much, as it would be rather irritating if a customer would need to run two versions in parallel on the same site (though depends a bit on app use case and resulting exposure, I guess).
I’d expect the ‘standard’ scenario to be testing on a separate, dedicated test instance, assuming the customer has one.
In other words, we do not have a clear expectation on this specific aspect, as long as we are able to offer a separate version for testing that is independent of the current production version (and does not require creation&deployment of a completely new app).
Appreciate your response @hopel, note that we are assessing potential solutions to the problem above, in the meantime if your app is already listed as paid on the Marketplace, you can test your app on development or staging or alternatively by deploying a new copy of it. Note that paid apps should not be tested on as all installations of production paid apps are billed.
Hi @hopel, indeed, cross-product Forge app listings will not be supported initially on the Marketplace.
This listing limitation is not intended to be permanent, and we plan to add support for multi-product Forge app compatibility in the future, based on interest from the ecosystem. For developers who have cross-product apps and are looking to list those on the Marketplace, we recommend:
creating a shared code base and register the same app twice & create two separate Marketplace listings
manage both the original app and the duplicate app from the same source repository. You may choose to either have two separate app manifests committed to the repository, or dynamically generate the duplicate manifest as a build step. There is no need to filter out product-specific permissions or modules from the app manifest - they will be filtered automatically during the installation process.
In your DevOps and/or CI/CD lifecycle, deploy changes to both apps alongside each other
We understand that this is not ideal and we are really keen to hear more about your cross-product app ideas so we can better prioritise the support of those apps in the future.
