Deployments

Every time you deploy a project, Swisblade creates a deployment record that tracks the entire process from start to finish.

Deployment flow

When you click Deploy in the dashboard (or a deploy is triggered automatically):

1. Git pull — Fetches the latest code from your configured branch/tag/SHA
2. Validate — Checks that stack.json is valid and all referenced services are properly configured
3. Sync contract — Detects changes to stack.json since the last deploy (new services, removed services, etc.)
4. Inject env vars — Reads your secrets from the dashboard, decrypts them, and prepares them for the containers
5. Provision infrastructure — Sets up any databases, caches, or queues declared in needs (if not already provisioned)
6. Build & start — Builds Docker images from your source code and starts all containers

Deployment states

State	Description
pending	Deploy queued
running	Build and startup in progress
success	All containers are running
failed	Something went wrong — check the logs

Viewing deploy logs

Real-time streaming

When a deploy is in progress, the dashboard streams logs in real time. You'll see each step as it happens: cloning, building, starting containers.

Historical logs

All deploy logs are persisted. Go to Project → Deployments to see the full log of any past deployment.

Failure diagnostics

If a deploy fails, Swisblade automatically captures:

• The last 15 lines of output from each failed container
• Error messages from the build step
• Missing environment variable warnings

This diagnostic information appears in the deploy log.

Triggering a redeploy

To redeploy with the latest code:

1. Go to your project in the dashboard
2. Click Deploy

Swisblade will pull the latest code from your configured ref, rebuild containers if the code changed, and restart the stack.

What triggers a rebuild

Change	Rebuilds?
Source code changed	Yes
stack.json changed	Yes (affected services only)
Environment variable changed	No (restart with new env, no rebuild)
No changes	Containers are restarted

Environment variable validation

Before starting containers, Swisblade checks that all required environment variables have values. If your stack.json declares:

"env": {
  "STRIPE_KEY": { "secret": true }
}

And you haven't set STRIPE_KEY in the dashboard, the deploy will fail with a clear message listing the missing variables.

Connection strings generated by the platform (like DATABASE_URL) are always present and don't need manual configuration.