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Export your app

When the virtual app works the way you want, export it. OpenBuilt produces a ZIP containing the manifest (schemas, pages, menu, data sources) and an optional set of sample records. Another OpenBuilt instance imports the ZIP to recreate the app.

Goal​

By the end you will have requested an export of your app, watched the job complete, and downloaded the resulting ZIP.

Prerequisites​

  • A virtual app you want to ship somewhere else.
  • Sample data you want to include, if any. The export dialog lets you tick which schemas to dump records from.

Steps​

  1. Open Exports in the left navigation. The page lists previous export jobs with their status (Queued, Running, Completed, Failed) and the downloadable artefact.

    Exports list

  2. Click Export application, or open your app's detail page and click Actions → Export. Pick which Application to export (the dialog pre-fills if you came from a detail page), pick the Snapshot to export from (defaults to the live draft), and tick the schemas whose records you want to include as sample data.

    Export application dialog

  3. Click Start export. The job moves to Exports with status Queued → Running. Small apps export in seconds; apps with thousands of records can take a minute or two.

    Export running

  4. When the row reaches Completed, click the Download ZIP action. The bundle contains manifest.json, one schemas/<slug>.json per schema, one data/<schema>.jsonl per included data set, and a README.md summarising the export.

    Export completed

  5. To re-import, copy the ZIP to the target instance, open Virtual apps → Import application there, pick the ZIP, and OpenBuilt recreates the app with its schemas, pages, and sample data.

    Re-import dialog

Verification​

The export is good when: the export job shows status Completed with a non-zero ZIP size and manifest.json validates inside the ZIP. Re-importing it onto another instance is the strongest possible test.

Common issues​

SymptomFix
Job sits on QueuedThe Nextcloud background jobs are not running — check php occ background-job:list on the host.
Job ends in FailedOpen the job row to see the error in the Logs tab. The two most common causes: the manifest is invalid (fix in the page designer), or a connector source is unreachable (sample-data dump retries it).
ZIP is tiny / emptyNo schemas were ticked in step 2 — re-run with at least the schemas you care about ticked.

Reference​