Golem Rollback

Rolling Back a Deployment

Both golem and golem-cli can be used — all commands below work with either binary.

Overview

Every golem deploy creates a new deployment revision — an immutable snapshot of the environment's components and HTTP API deployments. Rollback lets you revert the environment to a previous revision, restoring the exact component versions and API configuration that were active at that point.

Rollback does not rebuild or re-upload components — it re-activates a previously deployed revision on the server side.

Rollback by Revision

golem deploy --revision <REVISION_NUMBER> --yes

Reverts the environment to the exact state captured at the given deployment revision number. The revision must exist in the environment's deployment history.

If the specified revision is not found, the CLI prints an error and lists all available deployments with their revision numbers and versions.

Rollback by Version

golem deploy --version <VERSION_STRING> --yes

Looks up the deployment whose version label matches <VERSION_STRING> and rolls back to that revision. If multiple deployments share the same version string, the CLI reports an error and asks you to use --revision instead.

How Rollback Works

1. Prepare — the CLI fetches the target revision's deployment summary from the server and diffs it against the current deployment.
2. Diff — a unified diff is displayed showing exactly which components, component versions, environment variables, and HTTP API deployments will change.
3. Confirm — unless --yes is passed, the CLI prompts for confirmation before proceeding.
4. Apply — the CLI sends a DeploymentRollback request to the server containing the current revision and the target revision. The server atomically switches the environment to the target state.

If the target revision is identical to the current deployment (same deployment hash), the CLI reports "up to date" and takes no action.

Combining Rollback with Post-Deploy Actions

Rollback supports the same post-deploy flags as a normal deploy:

Examples

Roll back and update all running agents automatically:

golem deploy --revision 3 --update-agents auto --yes

Roll back by version and redeploy agents:

golem deploy --version "v1.2.0" --redeploy-agents --yes

Planning a Rollback (Dry Run)

golem deploy --yes --revision 3 --plan

Shows the diff of what would change without applying anything. Useful for inspecting the impact before committing.

Listing Available Revisions

If you do not know which revision to target, deploy with a non-existent revision number — the CLI will print all available deployments. Alternatively, use the environment API or the Golem dashboard to browse deployment history.

Constraints

• --revision and --version conflict with each other — use one or the other.
• --revision and --version conflict with --force-build, --stage, and --approve-staging-steps — rollback does not trigger a build.
• The environment must already have at least one deployment (a current deployment must exist) before a rollback can be performed.
• Rollback is an environment-level operation — it affects all components in the environment, not individual components.

Related Skills

• Load golem-deployment-version for how the version labels used by --version are assigned to each deployment.
• Load golem-deploy for creating deployments.