如何发布Azure Bot？已创建并测试Bot，对发布环节存疑

Hey there! Let’s tackle your questions about publishing your Azure Bot Service bot step by step:

Do you need to publish your bot? #

It depends on what you want to do with it:

• If you’re just learning/testing: You don’t have to publish right away. The Azure portal’s built-in test tool lets you validate basic functionality without deploying to a production environment.
• If you want others to use it or integrate with channels: Publishing is mandatory. The portal’s test window is a sandbox only accessible to you via the Azure interface—external users can’t reach it, and you can’t connect it to platforms like Teams, Slack, or your own website until it’s published.

What does the publishing process actually do? #

Publishing takes your bot (whether it’s a no-code/low-code bot built in the portal, or a custom-coded bot) and deploys it to a production-ready Azure hosting service (usually Azure App Service). This makes your bot publicly accessible via an endpoint, so it can receive and respond to messages from users or channel services.

Key things to know about publishing:

• For portal-built bots (like QnA Maker or Bot Composer bots), publishing pushes your bot’s configuration, intents, and knowledge base to a managed hosting instance linked to your Bot Service resource.
• For custom code bots, you’ll need to deploy your code to an Azure compute service (App Service, Functions, etc.) and then link that deployment to your Bot Service so it knows where to route incoming messages.
• After publishing, you can set up additional features like:
  • Channel integrations (connect to Teams, Slack, Facebook Messenger, etc.)
  • Monitoring and analytics to track bot usage and performance
  • Scaling options to handle more user traffic
  • CI/CD pipelines to automate updates to your bot

Quick note on the Build→Test→Publish→Evaluate flow #

You’ve already completed Build and Test—publishing moves your bot to the "production" stage, and Evaluate involves using analytics and user feedback to refine your bot’s functionality over time.

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者nam