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Last updated: 25 Aug 2023

Roll back your app

You can roll back your app by:

updating the image tag to an older release in the govuk-helm-charts repo
triggering the deploy GitHub Action to deploy an older release - this only works in the integration environment

Updating the image tag to an older release

Get the full commit simple hashing algorithm (SHA) associated with the older release you want to roll back to.

There are multiple ways to do this. For example, if you are using the GitHub user interface:
- go to your app’s repo
- go to Releases > Tags and select the abbreviated SHA, for example bc0b0b0
- copy the full SHA, for example bc0b0b0c980f867b293cd40157c6da3a29186680
Go to the image-tags folder in the govuk-helm-charts repo.
Replace the contents of the relevant image tag file with the full commit SHA of the release you want to roll back to.
Create a pull request and merge the change into the main branch.

When you manually trigger the deploy GitHub Action for an app, you will stop the automatic update of that app’s images. You can re-enable the automatic image update by following the documentation on re-enabling automatic image updates after manual deploys.

Go to your app’s repo and select Releases.
Find the release number for the version of the app you want to roll back to.
Go to Actions and select Workflows > Deploy.
Select Run workflow and enter the release number that you want to roll back to.
Select Run workflow to manually deploy the older version of the app.

Argo CD will then:

Check the #govuk-deploy-alerts Slack channel for a notification when the older version of the app is successfully deployed.

Go to your app’s repo.
Go to Actions and select Workflows > Set automatic_deploys_enabled (optionally image_tag too).
Select Run workflow and complete the fields as required.