Test and publish a WhatsApp Flow

Every flow Paige builds is testable immediately — before you’ve connected a WhatsApp number, and before anything is live. This page covers the whole path from first preview to retirement.

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Preview a flow in Paige

Open the Flows tab and pick a flow from the list. The right-hand panel renders it in a phone frame, and two buttons control what you’re doing with it:

• Try it runs the flow interactively. Step through every screen exactly as a customer would — fill in the fields, tap the buttons, reach the end.
• Inspect is the other half of the same toggle. It goes back to looking at the flow rather than clicking through it.
• Debug appears only while Try it is active. It shows the data each screen submits as you move through, which is how you check that a field is carrying the value you expect.

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The live version versus your working version

Once a flow is live on your own number, a Paige Dev / Production toggle appears above the preview. This is how you see both sides of an unpublished change at once:

• Paige Dev renders your current version — the one with your latest edits in it.
• Production renders what your customers are actually seeing right now.

Selecting a flow defaults to Production when it’s live on your number, and Paige Dev when it isn’t. The toggle is hidden entirely until there’s a live version to compare against, because until then there’s only one version to look at. The preview refreshes itself whenever a flow is republished, so you don’t need to reload the page after a deploy.

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Paige Dev and your own number

Two WhatsApp numbers are involved in every flow, and knowing which does what explains most of the buttons on this page. Paige Dev is a WhatsApp number Paige shares with everyone. Every flow you create or change is published to it automatically, which is what makes a flow testable on day one. It’s also the validation gate: Meta checks the flow when it lands on Paige Dev, so an invalid flow is caught there and never reaches your own number. Your own number is where customers meet the flow. A flow only gets there when you deploy it, and only your number can send it to a real customer. You’ll see this reflected in the detail pane: In the flow list the same thing shows as a small tag on the row — New (Not yet deployed to your WhatsApp number) or Pending (Changes will go live on next deploy).

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Testing on a real handset

Link your phone to the Paige Dev number and message it, and your bot answers — flows included. See Testing with Paige Dev. What you can check on each number differs:

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Publish a flow

Deploy is how you publish. Tick the flow in the deploy dialog and Paige registers it on your WhatsApp number and publishes it in one step — that’s the path for a brand-new flow and for pushing changes to a live one. Deploy works out what needs doing from where the flow currently stands, so there’s nothing else to choose. The Publish button in the Flows tab is narrower than it looks. It only appears for a flow that’s already on your number and sitting in draft. A LOCAL flow has no Publish button, because there’s nothing on your number to publish yet.

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Edit a flow that’s already live

Editing a live flow is safe, and it’s the normal way to work. You don’t need to deprecate it or build a replacement. The moment you ask for a change, the Paige Dev copy updates, so you can test the new version straight away. Your customers keep seeing the version you last deployed. Nothing they experience changes until you deploy again and tick that flow. That gap is deliberate, and it’s worth understanding rather than working around: While a flow is in that in-between state, Paige tells you in three places: the Pending tag on the list row, the Changes pending deploy badge in the detail pane, and a count on the Deploy button.

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Sync

Sync appears once a flow exists on your own number. It’s a one-way pull from Meta, and it does four things:

• Pulls the current status. This is how a flow shows up as BLOCKED or THROTTLED — Meta sets those, and you only see them after a sync.
• Refreshes validation errors, including clearing ones that have since been fixed.
• Refreshes the live-data connection health. For a dynamic flow, a sync is the only thing that fills in the endpoint health panel.
• Re-mints the preview, so the phone frame is showing the current article.

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View JSON

View JSON jumps to the flow’s file in the Code tab, where you can read exactly what was generated. Read it freely — just don’t edit it by hand. Ask Paige for the change instead, so the result stays valid.

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Deprecate a flow

Deprecating takes a flow offline. Someone who receives a message containing a deprecated flow sees an error if they try to open it. Select the published flow in the Flows tab and click Deprecate.

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Delete a flow

Delete is available on a DRAFT or LOCAL flow. The confirmation spells out what’s about to happen: This will permanently delete <name>. — plus The flow will also be removed from your Meta WhatsApp account. when the flow is on your number — and This action cannot be undone. Two things to know:

• Deleting a LOCAL flow still tears down its Paige Dev copy. If that cleanup fails, the delete is blocked entirely rather than left half-done: Could not remove the flow’s Paige Dev copy. The flow was not deleted — please try again.
• A published flow can’t be deleted — it gets deprecated instead. Meta refuses to hard-delete a published flow, so if a delete is attempted on one (for example by asking Paige in the chat), Paige deprecates it and says so: A published flow can’t be hard-deleted, so it was deprecated instead.