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How do I roll back a deployment?

Keyword: How do I roll back a deployment on SmartTouch?

SmartTouch provides two rollback methods. Use stctl rollback for the fastest recovery during an incident. Use a Git revert pull request for a traceable, 'auditable' rollback.

Goal

Revert the Remote Access Service in dev (or staging) to the last known good version.

Prerequisites

  • stctl installed and authenticated
  • The service has a previous successful deployment

This method reverts the cluster state immediately without a pull request. You can use it when an incident is in active status and every minute matters.

Step 1—Identify the previous deployment

stctl deployment history --env dev --service remote-access-service

Expected output:

REVISION   IMAGE TAG   DEPLOYED BY      DEPLOYED AT           STATUS
5          1.1.0       github-actions   2026-06-06T14:30:00Z  current
4          1.0.1       github-actions   2026-06-05T10:15:00Z  healthy
3          1.0.0       github-actions   2026-06-04T09:00:00Z  healthy

Revision 4 (1.0.1) is the last healthy deployment to roll back to.

Step 2—Roll back to the previous revision

stctl rollback --env dev --service remote-access-service --revision 4

Expected output:

✔  Rollback initiated
Service:       remote-access-service
Rolling back:  revision 5 (1.1.0) → revision 4 (1.0.1)
ETA:           ~60 seconds

Step 3—Verify the rollback completed

stctl status --env dev --service remote-access-service

Expected:

Status:   Running
Replicas: 2/2 ready
Image:    harbor.smarttouch.io/myteam/remote-access-service:1.0.1

Run a probe to confirm remote access sessions are working again:

stctl remote-access probe --env dev

Method 2—Audit rollback via Git revert

This method creates a pull request that reverses the offending commit. Use it for non-urgent rollbacks where a full audit trail is required (for example, production rollbacks or compliance environments).

Step 1—Find the commit that caused the problem

git log --oneline -10

a3f9c12 feat: update remote-access-service to v1.1.0
b7d2e41 fix: update session timeout configuration
...

Step 2—Revert the commit

git revert a3f9c12 --no-commit
git commit -m "revert: roll back remote-access-service from v1.1.0 to v1.0.1"
git push origin fix/rollback-v1.1.0

Step 3—Open and merge the revert pull request

Open a pull request from fix/rollback-v1.1.0 to main. The pull request shows exactly what changed. After approval and merge, Argo CD deploys the reverted state automatically.

Validation

Rollback is complete when:

Check Command Expected
Correct image running stctl status --env dev --service remote-access-service Previous image tag
Session broker active stctl remote-access probe --env dev Probe succeeds
Active sessions unaffected stctl remote-access list --env dev Sessions that were open before rollback remain open

Note on active sessions: A rollback performs a rolling update. Sessions open during the rollback may be interrupted if the pod handling the session is replaced. Warn users before initiating a rollback during business hours.

Troubleshooting

stctl rollback fails with no previous revision found

The service has only one deployment revision. You have nothing to roll back to. Deploy a known-good image tag directly:

stctl deploy --env dev --service remote-access-service \
  --image harbor.smarttouch.io/myteam/remote-access-service:1.0.0

Next steps