How to Manage Deployments in App Platform

Validated on 20 Dec 2021 • Last edited on 27 Sep 2023 database | doctl | logs | app spec

App Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that allows developers to publish code directly to DigitalOcean servers without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

You can view a deployment’s logs to check for error messages and rollback deployments as needed.

View Your App’s Deployment Logs Using Automation

To retrieve logs for a specific deployment using the CLI or API, you need to provide deployment’s ID. You can retrieve a list of deployments and their IDs using the CLI’s doctl apps list-deployments command or the /v2/apps/{app_id}/deployments endpoint

How to view a deployment's logs using the DigitalOcean CLI

To view a deployment's logs via the command-line, follow these steps:

  1. Install doctl, the DigitalOcean command-line tool.

  2. Create a personal access token, and save it for use with doctl.

  3. Use the token to grant doctl access to your DigitalOcean account.

                  doctl auth init

  4. Finally, view a deployment's logs with doctl apps logs. The basic usage looks like this, but you'll want to read the usage docs for more details:

                  doctl apps logs <app id> <component name (defaults to all components)> [flags]
How to view a deployment's logs using the DigitalOcean API

To view a deployment's logs using the DigitalOcean API, follow these steps:

  1. Create a personal access token, and save it for use with the API.

  2. Send a GET request to https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/apps/{app_id}/deployments/{deployment_id}/logs

    cURL

    To view a deployment's logs with cURL, call:

    
                curl -X GET \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/apps/{app_id}/deployments/{deployment_id}/logs"

    Python

    
                import os
from pydo import Client

client = Client(token=os.environ.get("DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN"))

get_resp = client.apps.get_logs_aggregate(app_id="b6bdf840", deployment_id="a6adf840")

View Your App’s Deployments Logs Using the Control Panel

To review your app deployments in the control panel, click on your app and then click on the Activity tab to view your app’s history of deployment activity. Click the Deployment link for any active deployment to view its real-time logs.

Deployments screen

The deployment marked as “LIVE” is the one currently being served at the live URL for your app. You can click the commit link to go to the commit that triggered a deployment or hover over the -m flag to see the commit message.

To manually redeploy your app, click the Action button in the top right corner, then click Deploy in the drop-down menu. This pulls the latest code from the resource’s associated source repo and runs a build and deploy process.

Roll Back to a Previous Deployment Using the Control Panel

You can undo a faulty deployment by rolling back the app to a previous deployment. This lets you recover from accidentally deploying code with errors or an app spec that causes failures.

For apps on the Starter and Basic tiers, you can roll back to the most recent successful deployment. For apps on the Professional tier, you can roll back to the ten most recent successful deployments.

To roll back an app to a previous deployment, the deployment must be in the same region as the app and must have the same database resources and configuration.

Rolling back an app restores the app’s code, configuration, and app spec, but not any database data. To roll back a database’s data, restore it from a backup as described in the Managed Databases documentation.

Roll Back a Deployment Using the API

To rollback a deployment using the API, you need to provide app’s ID and the ID of the deployment you want rollback to. Use the /v2/apps to retrieve a list of apps and their respective IDs, and use the /v2/apps/{app_id}/deployments endpoint to retrieve a list of deployments for a specified app.

How to rollback a deployment using the DigitalOcean API

To rollback a deployment using the DigitalOcean API, follow these steps:

  1. Create a personal access token, and save it for use with the API.

  2. Send a POST request to https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/apps/{app_id}/rollback

    cURL

    To rollback a deployment with cURL, call:

    
                curl -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN" \
  -d '{ "deployment_id": "3aa4d20e-5527-4c00-b496-601fbd22520a" }' \
  "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/apps/{app_id}/rollback"

    Python

    
                import os
from pydo import Client

client = Client(token=os.environ.get("DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN"))

create_resp = client.apps.create_rollback(app_id="b6bdf840")

Roll Back a Deployment Using the Control Panel

To roll back an app, go to the Apps page and click your app, then click the Activity tab.

In the Activity tab, click the Rollback link for the deployment you want to roll back. The Rollback window that opens displays a comparison between the current deployment and the selected deployment:

  • Expand the app resource name under Global Settings Changed to see whether the source code or resource settings have changed. For source code changes, you can use the commit link to go to the commit that triggered the deployment you want to roll back to. You can also hover over the -m flag to see the commit message.

  • Expand ALL SETTINGS DIFF to see the diff between your current and previous deployment’s app spec. Any additions and deletions to the spec are displayed using + and -.

App rollback

Click Rollback to start the rollback deployment. The rollback deployment duplicates the old deployment and contains the same code and configurations.

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