Beta Tier and Testing

Beta Tier

We push major code changes weekly on Tuesday evenings (Pacific Standard Time), and hotfixes throughout the week. The beta tier is always ahead of production and we encourage developers to run regression tests on the beta tier and report bugs before they impact production services.

Every week, usually on Sunday evenings, we stage our weekly push, which happens on Tuesday evenings, on the beta tier. This provides ourselves and developers 48 hours to test and find bugs before the build hits production. After Tuesday, while the beta tier is continuously updated with hotfix patches which are queued up for the daily hotfix release, the production tier is updated with the hotfix push in the evenings, Pacific Standard Time.

The rule of thumb will be to always test on beta tier and debug on production, as the beta tier contains the code which will shortly be running in production.

Beta and Production Mapping

Integration Point	Production URI	Beta URI
Facebook.com	www.facebook.com	www.beta.facebook.com
Mobile Web	m.facebook.com	m.beta.facebook.com
Apps in Canvas	apps.facebook.com	apps.beta.facebook.com
Graph API	graph.facebook.com	graph.beta.facebook.com

If you're using one of the official Facebook SDKs:

Facebook SDK for iOS

Modify the URI graph.facebook.com to graph.beta.facebook.com in /src/Facebook.m

Facebook SDK for PHP

Modify the URI graph.facebook.com to graph.beta.facebook.com in /src/base_facebook.php

Facebook SDK for Javascript

When you include the SDK replace connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js with connect.beta.facebook.net/en_US/all.js.

Beta and Accounts

To test against the beta tier, please make sure to use either test users or if you are using regular user accounts, please make sure the user accounts have authorized the Dev App.

Reporting Bugs found on Beta

If you test against the beta tier, and discover bugs which are not yet present on the production tier, you should open a bug and add the beta tag to your bug. We give higher priority to bugs reported on Monday and Tuesday with this tag, and endeavor to fix any such bugs before they are pushed to the production tiers.

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Push Schedule

Day	Beta Tier	Production Tier
Sunday	Weekly release is staged (evening)	Release from Tuesday prior + Hotfixes
Monday	Weekly release is staged	Release from Tuesday prior + Hotfixes
Tuesday	Weekly release is staged	Weekly release is pushed
Wednesday	Weekly release + Hotfixes staged as they are ready	Weekly release + Hotfixes (evening)
Thursday	Weekly release + Hotfixes staged as they are ready	Weekly release + Hotfixes (evening)
Friday	Weekly release + Hotfixes staged as they are ready	Weekly release + Hotfixes (evening)
Saturday	Weekly release + Hotfixes staged as they are ready	Weekly release + Hotfixes (evening)

Note from Wednesday through Saturday, the Beta tier will be updated as hotfixes are checked in, while the Production Tier is updated with all hotfixes queued up for the day in the evenings PST.

Push Status

You can poll the Push Status API for real-time updates about when a code push is in progress. It is good practice run tests against your apps once the beta tier and/or production have been updated. You can use the Push Status API to trigger automated regression test runs.