Freeze & Live

Atelier can serve your visitors in two ways. Live is the default: every visit is rendered from your published content, so a change reaches visitors the moment you publish it. Frozen serves a snapshot instead — a fixed copy of the whole site from the moment you froze it, stored as plain files.

While the site is frozen, nothing you publish reaches visitors until you freeze again. You, and anyone else who is logged in, always see the live site — on the public pages and in the console — so you check your edits on the real URLs.

Why freeze

• Release a whole version at once. Edit and publish many pages over a week, then freeze once. Visitors go from the old site to the new one in a single step.
• Undo in one click. Every snapshot is kept. If a release goes wrong, serve the previous snapshot. No export, no restore.
• Faster, calmer pages. A frozen page is a file. It is served with cache headers a CDN understands, and nothing about your visitors' requests touches the database.

Freeze the site

In the console, open Settings and find Snapshots.

1. Optionally give the snapshot a name, such as Spring launch.
2. Choose Freeze now. Atelier renders every published page — this takes a few seconds on a small site, longer with many images.
3. When it finishes, visitors see the new snapshot. The status line reads Visitors see snapshot Spring launch. You see the live site.

If the export finds a problem — usually a link to a page that does not exist — the snapshot is taken but not served, and the problems are listed. Fix them and freeze again, or choose Serve it anyway.

Switch between versions

The Snapshots list shows Live at the top, then every snapshot, newest first. The one visitors currently see is marked.

• Serve this switches visitors to that snapshot immediately. Nothing restarts.
• Serve live goes back to rendering every visit. Snapshots are kept.
• View opens a snapshot so you can see exactly what visitors see, or look at an older version before serving it.
• Keep marks a snapshot as permanent. Housekeeping never removes a kept snapshot.

From the command line

The same verbs exist in the atelier CLI:

atelier site freeze --label "Spring launch"   # snapshot the site and serve it
atelier site snapshots                          # list snapshots; ● marks what visitors see
atelier site use 20260910-1102-spring-launch    # serve that snapshot
atelier site live                               # back to live
atelier site prune --keep 10                    # delete old snapshots (kept and served ones stay)

Inside the appliance these are drush aincient:freeze, aincient:snapshots, aincient:use, aincient:live and aincient:prune.

Good to know

• Backups include snapshots. atelier data backup bundles them, and a restore brings back both the snapshots and which one was being served.
• Disk. Each snapshot holds a full copy of the site's pages, stylesheets and resized images. Housekeeping keeps the ten most recent snapshots plus everything you marked as kept.
• A page missing from the snapshot shows the snapshot's own "not found" page. While a snapshot is served, visitors never reach the live application at all — which is also why the public site stays up while Atelier updates itself.
• Behind a CDN. Frozen pages are sent with Cache-Control: public, max-age=300 and an X-Atelier-Served: frozen header; logged-in responses stay private. After switching snapshots, allow up to five minutes for cached pages to refresh, or purge your CDN.