**Publishing requires capacity** Before publishing, you will need to set your [production capacity](https://docs.difr.com/books/platform-administrators-guide/page/capacity). Setting your production capacity specifies the amount of VMs you would like to publish your Sandbox image to. If you are not familiar with this, you can read more about system capacity and elastic instance management in our documentation [here](https://docs.difr.com/books/platform-administrators-guide/page/capacity).If there are no instance types with a max set to at least 1, **publishing will be disabled**.
## Fundamentals A **Publish** pushes any changes and configurations made to the Sandbox image to the production (or test) instances and, in turn, to the end users accessing your Frame-managed workload VMs. [](https://docs.difr.com/uploads/images/gallery/2025-10/Xv0image.png) ### Initiating a Publish Once your Sandbox is configured as desired and you're ready to publish, follow the steps below: 1. Navigate to the **Sandbox** page of your account Dashboard and ensure your Sandbox is powered on. 2. Click **Publish** in the top right corner of the Sandbox panel. A confirmation dialog will appear.You may cancel a publish up \*\*until the time Frame Platform begins creating production or test instances\*\* (depending on whether you invoked a Publish, Quick Publish, or a Test Publish, respectively).
#### From Sandbox To cancel an ongoing Publish from the Sandbox, once your Sandbox is in the Publishing state, go to the Sandbox page and under the kebab menu, the **Cancel Publish** option can be selected:**Reminder By default, all AHV-based accounts use the quick publish function**. The default number of production instances created on publish is 10. If you wish to override this number, follow the instructions below.
1. From your account Dashboard, navigate to the **Settings** page. Under the *General* tab, **enable quick publish** as shown below.If the min value in your capacity settings is set to less than the quick publish value specified, the quick value publish settings are ignored and a regular publish is performed.
That's it! You have successfully enabled quick publish for your Frame account. Any publish operations initiated from this point forward will be Quick Publishes. ### Test Publish **Test Publishing** gives administrators the ability to test their updated Sandbox image in a “Test Instance Pool” which is **separate from their production instances**. This gives administrators the option to alter the instances in an isolated environment, completely identical to production, without concern of interrupting access to the normal production instances. Test publishes can easily be rolled back via the restoration of a backup, or promoted to the active published configuration, depending on the results. [](https://docs.difr.com/uploads/images/gallery/2025-10/ISZimage.png) Before a test publish, you will need to set your [test capacity](https://docs.difr.com/books/platform-administrators-guide/page/capacity#add-test-pool). Setting your test capacity specifies the amount of VMs you would like to publish your Sandbox image to. If you are not familiar with this, you can read more about system capacity and elastic instance management in our documentation [here](https://docs.difr.com/books/platform-administrators-guide/page/capacity#add-test-pool). 1\. In your Frame Account Dashboard under the **Settings** tab, **Enable Test Publish**. Click the **Save** button to apply the change. [](https://docs.difr.com/uploads/images/gallery/2025-10/wYWimage.png) 2\. A prompt will appear, notifying you that the Test Publishing feature **cannot be disabled once enabled** on an account. Click **Confirm****Warning** This change cannot be undone once enabled for your account.
[](https://docs.difr.com/uploads/images/gallery/2025-10/Ff5image.png) 3\. Next, verify you have at least one Test Pool under [Capacity](https://docs.difr.com/link/114#bkmrk-add-test-pool-1). 4\. When you wish to perform a test publish, navigate to the **Sandbox** page of the Dashboard and click the **Publish** button in the Sandbox panel.**Caution** Frame strongly recommends creating a backup of your Sandbox before Test Publishing. In the event you wish to discard all changes to the test environment and return to the original Sandbox configuration, you will be able to restore your backup.
[](https://docs.difr.com/uploads/images/gallery/2025-10/92Aimage.png) 5\. The Publish dialog will appear, providing a dropdown menu to select your desired publish option. Select **Test Publish** and then click the **Test Publish button** to initiate provision of the test publish instances. [](https://docs.difr.com/uploads/images/gallery/2025-10/VBjimage.png) Lastly, you will want to create some Test Launchpads for your Test Instances. This will allow admins to test sessions and determine whether to promote the test publish to production users or not. Once the test publish is complete, you will want to **test the changes from a Test Launchpad**. Do that now by navigating to a test Launchpad and launching a session. Manually verify the changes while in the session. - **If everything is ok**, it's time to **promote** our test publish! Move on to the next step. - **If there are any issues**, go back to your Sandbox and make necessary changes and initiate another Test Publish for further testing. 6\. Next, we'll **promote** our Test Publish. To begin, click the **Publish button** in the top right corner of the Sandbox panel once again. This time, our confirmation dialog will provide a **Promote** option. Select and click the **Promote button**. [](https://docs.difr.com/uploads/images/gallery/2025-10/GDRimage.png) Once the promoted Publish is complete, your users should be able to access production instances with all of your changes applied.**Note** Promotion of a Test Publish does not create a new Sandbox backup.