Introduction

Sometimes you end up deploying an application to Dokku and then realize that you want to revert the changes you made.

In this tutorial we'll go over how to roll back a Dokku deployment.

Before we start

Preface

Keep in mind that rolling back a deployment is a dangerous operation, proceed with caution.

Requirements

• Dokku server

Don't have a Dokku server?
Check out my Dokku tutorial.

Get the commit hash

First well need to get the hash of the commit that we want to roll back to.

To accomplish that, list out the last 10 commits that have been made to the repository.

git log --pretty=format:"%h - %s" -10

You will get an output similar to this:

3cacb03 - Revert "build: broaden possible purged files"
25e3b2b - chore: move node dependency to dev dependencies
6a42416 - Revert "ci: run npm "build" script in predeploy stage"
0b53fdd - ci: execute php buildpack first
2d27d60 - ci: run npm "build" script in predeploy stage
1bc1276 - build: broaden possible purged files
1bed300 - style: lint
5ab255c - Revert "build: only run tailwind JIT mode on local"
23b0c4b - build: fix data-tables styles getting purged
52ca32e - ci: move scripts back to app.json

Now copy the hash of the commit that you want to roll back to.
For example 2d27d60.

How to rollback

Now that we have the commit hash, we can roll back to it.

Just force push to Dokku with the commit hash, instead of the local branch.

# git push --force <remote> <local branch>:<remote branch>
git push --force dokku de7fc85:master

That is it!
Now Dokku will build the application from that commit.
Effectively rolling back to that commit.

End

That was easy, wasn't it?

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Conclusion

Congratulations, today you have learned how to roll back a Dokku deployment.

Let me know if the tutorial was useful to you in the comments!