DocumentationExperience League Authoring Guide

Publish content

Last update: Fri Sep 12 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

This article explains how to preview content on experienceleague.corp.adobe.com, how to publish (or activate) content manually, and how to configure your repo to auto-activate. We use “publish” and “activate” synonymously.

Preview content preview

When you successfully commit changes to the main branch, the changes are pushed to experienceleague.corp.adobe.com for preview. View the Slack summary for a list of preview links.

slack notification

If validation fails, your updates will not be available for preview until validation succeeds.

NOTE
If you don’t get a Slack notification whenever you commit to the main branch, check the email address in Github Desktop > Settings > Git. It should be your Adobe email. Contact Bob if you still don’t get a notification.

Activate content from Slack activate-slack

If validation succeeds, the Slack summary displays a Publish Now button.

  1. In the Slack summary, click Publish Now.

  2. If necessary, sign in to Jenkins (VPN or Corp required).

    If you’re a contractor, you might need to get access rights. Contact IT to request to add https://docs.ci to the list of approved servers for the “Vendor_Basic” VPN.

  3. Click Build to run the activate job for the repo.

You’ll get a Slack notification when the activation job is complete.

NOTE
After the AEM migration, publishing takes a few minutes longer to run through the final stage, so the updates take 15-20 minutes longer to complete. We’re working on updating the Slack notification so that the updates are available immediately.
If you publish a new article, it’s necessary to double-publish for now until we fix a bug. See email and Slack updates for details.

Activate content by running a Jenkins job activate-jenkins

You can activate content by running the activate-new (previously “activate-exl”) job in Jenkins. This method does the same thing as running the Publish Now job from Slack.

The changes should go live on experienceleague.adobe.com as soon as the job has completed.

  1. Make sure that the production job with the most recent commit to main is complete.
  2. Go to Jenkins and open the activate-new job.
  3. Click Log In in the upper right corner and sign in using you Adobe LDAP account.
  4. Click Build with Parameters.
  5. Choose the repo and language, and click Build.

activate exl

IMPORTANT
As a rule, don’t commit to main unless you’re ready to activate the content soon after previewing it.
There is no connection between activating English and localization repos. Localization repos are configured to auto-activate. If you commit to main successfully but don’t activate, your changes will go live in other languages.

Publishing in the new Edge workflow

Edge publishing overview

Before the Edge replatform, the publishing process worked like this:

Pre Edge workflow

With Edge, the publishing process works like this (step 7):

Post Edge workflow

Key differences:

  • When the author runs Publish Now (step 3) and gets the production URL (step 5), the link does not work immediately as it did before the Edge re-platform. Now, updates are pushed through the Edge pipeline, which causes a delay. The updates will not go live for at least 10 minutes, and often even longer.
  • If Publish Now is not run, content used to go live reliably every 2 hours via auto-activate. Now, two separate auto-activate jobs need to run for content to go live. This sometimes leads to long delays in content going live, especially when Publish Now is not run.

If the activate-new job doesn’t run

After you click Publish Now and start the activate-new validation job, you should get a Slack notification within a few minutes. However, in some cases, one of the activate-new production jobs will stall, causing a backup in the queue. If this happens, drop a note in the sccm-assistance Slack channel. The stalled job should be stopped and re-started. If additional jobs continue to fail, there is likely a server issue.

If updates are not available within 2 hours after Publish Now

If articles aren’t updated in a timely manner, it’s usually for one of these reasons:

  • Service outage.
  • Content is processed properly but not yet published due to 2-hour cache issue.
  • Updates to the API were not successful.
  • API updates were successful, but Edge failed to detect changes.

Service outage

Service outages are rare. If there is a service outage, contact an EXL engineer.

Cache issue

Until the Akamai migration is complete, content is updated on AEM Live (Helix), but due to a cache issue, there can be as long as a 2-hour delay before the content goes fully live on EXL.

You can swap out the beginning of the URL to check whether content is previewed on AEM Live.

https://main--exlm-prod--adobe-experience-league.aem.live/en/docs

IMPORTANT
Do not share AEM Live links with customers.

Example:

If the updates appear on AEM Live but not in EXL, wait as long as 2 hours for the content to go live on EXL. There is nothing we can do to speed up the process.

NOTE
The cache issue varies for different regions. At times, one person will be able to view the updated content while a person who lives in a different region will not be able to view the updates.

API issues

If updates haven’t gone live in a timely manner, drop a note in sccm-assistance on Slack. We can check the API for issues.

Publishing Schedule publishing-schedule

Auto-activated content is published thirty minutes past every odd hour PST. So if you publish your content at midnight PST, you can expect it to be published shortly after 01:30 PST. The following table provides an overview for our worldwide authors.

Time Zone
Schedule
PST
Odd hours on the half hour
MST
Even hours on the half hour
EST
Even hours on the half hour
GMT
Odd hours on the half hour
CET
Even hours on the half hour
EET
Odd hours on the half hour
IST
Odd hours on the hour
NOTE
The schedule is based on PST. Therefore when the US begins/ends DST (second Sunday of March/first Sunday of November), this schedule will shift for the rest of the world that observes DST later/earlier and for those that do not observe DST at all.
TIP
If you need your changes to go live sooner than scheduled, run the activate-new job.

Pipeline overview

Here’s some background info for the EXL pipeline.

Hooking up a repo to the pipeline (admin)

To hook up a repo to the EXL pipeline:

  • Run GenerateExlJob in Jenkins to add the repo to the EXL pipeline. Once this job is run, the repo should appear here: Jenkins EXL. (SCCM/Bob)
  • Add repo (and all language repos) to Airtable. (SCCM/Bob)
  • Add and configure public mirror. (SCCM/Bob)
  • Add webhook for Acrolinx. (SCCM/Bob)
  • Turn on Publish flag in Airtable to allow publishing. (SCCM/Bob)

See Creating and configuring repositories.

What happens when a repo is updated?

When you commit changes to the main branch of a repo that is connected to the pipeline, the following actions occur:

  • The public mirror on github.com/adobedocs/<repo-name> is updated.
  • The localization repos are updated, and machine translation is triggered.
  • Content is validated in Jenkins. See Validation.
  • If validation succeeds, content is packaged and uploaded to an Azure server. That package is processed and rendered into HTML for preview on experienceleague.corp.adobe.com.
  • If the repo is set to auto-activate, the changes will go live on experienceleague.adobe.com in the next pickup that occurs every two hours. If you run the activate-new job in Jenkins, the content goes live to production as soon as that job finishes.
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