Rolling back a deployment

If a deployment causes a problem, a broken page, an error in production, unexpected behaviour, you can roll back to any previous deployment in seconds.

How rollback works in Orbit

Orbit keeps every past deployment's built artifact. Rolling back doesn't rebuild anything, it promotes an already-built, already-tested version back to production. This makes rollbacks fast (typically under 30 seconds) and reliable.

Rolling back to a previous deployment

1. Open your project in Orbit
2. Click the Deployments tab
3. Find the deployment you want to restore, look for the last known good version
4. Open it by clicking the commit message
5. Click Promote

The promoted deployment immediately becomes the live version. The deployment detail page shows a LIVE badge next to its status.

Identifying the right deployment to restore

On the Deployments tab, each row shows:

• Commit message and hash
• Branch it came from
• Deployment status (Live, Failed, etc.)
• Time deployed
• Author name

The currently live deployment shows a LIVE badge. Look for the deployment immediately before the one that caused the problem.

After a rollback

Once you've rolled back, the bad deployment is no longer serving traffic but is still in your history. Fix the underlying issue in your repo and push a new commit, this triggers a fresh build that goes through the normal deploy flow.

You don't need to do anything to "undo" the rollback. The next successful push to your production branch automatically becomes the new live version.

Rollback vs deploy lock

If you're not ready to roll back but want to stop new deployments from going live while you investigate, use a deploy lock instead:

1. On the project overview, click Deploy Locked
2. Add a reason (e.g. "investigating production issue")

This freezes the current live version while you diagnose. No new push-triggered deployments will go live until you unlock.

See Deploying your project for more on deploy locks.

Staging promotions

If you use a staging environment, you can promote a staging deployment to production without going through GitHub:

1. On the project overview, find the Staging section
2. If staging is ahead of production, a Promote button appears
3. Click it to push the staging build to production immediately

This is useful for testing a release on staging first, then promoting it directly, no extra push needed.