Release A Minor Block Change

In this how-to guide, you'll learn how to identify whether changes made to a specific block are non-breaking, and if so, how to release those changes to your block users.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you already have a published block that you are modifying. If you don't have a published block yet, see "Building an Element Page Tutorial," which covers creating and publishing blocks.

1. Ensure That Your Changes Are Actually Non-Breaking

You need to be certain that the changes you're making to your block are actually non-breaking, because releasing breaking changes using this method can introduce errors for your block users and cause them to lose some (or all) of the data in their block configs.

How Can You Tell?

Look at this flowchart and determine what kind of changes you're making. If any of them are breaking changes, consider either only making the non-breaking changes, or releasing the changes as an opt-in new version of your block.

2. Verify Your Changes in Staging

Assuming that your changes are in fact non-breaking, you should release them to staging so you can verify that they work as intended without affecting any of your block users. To do that, go to your terminal and navigate to your block's home directory and type these commands:

npm run build
element update

Your changes will now be available for you (and anyone in your development org) to see in Site Designer and via the Site Designer Preview link. Manually test them in a theme and verify that they are ready to release to your block users. If your changes are not ready yet, re-run npm run build and element update again every time you alter the block code, and then test again.

3. Create a Minor Release

When your changes are ready, you can release them by publishing a minor release. Minor releases will instantly propagate to your block users; they don't need to take any action to receive the update in their blocks. In your terminal, run this command:

element release -n "A minor release"

This is also a good time to tag the release with a commit. To do so, run this command in your terminal:

git commit -am "A minor release"