Is automated rollbacks possible in GitHub Actions?

[Rod-at-DOH]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Question

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Workflow Configuration

Discussion Details

I've searched through this discussion group to see what I could find concerning automated rollbacks of failed deployments butls didn't find anything that addresses that. I personally don't think it is possible to automatically rollback a deployment if something should fail during the process of the GitHub Action running, but I thought I would ask.

Is it possible to automatically rollback a failed GitHub Action/Workflow deployment?

[FaithMutua-code]

Hi @Rod-at-DOH,

Great question .... you're definitely not alone in wondering about this!

By default, GitHub Actions doesn't include built-in support for automatic rollbacks after a failed deployment. However, it is absolutely possible to implement automated rollbacks yourself using some custom logic in your workflow.

Here’s how it generally works:

🛠️ Basic Concept

You can structure your workflow to:

Deploy your application.

Run health checks or validations (e.g., API tests, smoke tests).

If those fail, trigger a rollback step to restore the previous version.

This is usually done by:

Storing deployment metadata (e.g., previous commit SHA, version number, or artifacts).

Using a deployment tool or script that supports rollback (like Kubernetes kubectl rollout undo, Terraform, Ansible, etc.).

Adding logic to your workflow like this:

jobs:
deploy:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Deploy app
run: ./deploy.sh

  - name: Run smoke tests
    run: ./test.sh
    continue-on-error: true
    id: test

  - name: Rollback if tests fail
    if: steps.test.outcome == 'failure'
    run: ./rollback.sh

🧠 Tips

Keep your rollback process as simple and fast as possible ........the idea is to return to a known good state quickly.

Monitor your deployment closely (logs, alerts, etc.), especially if you're running rollbacks automatically.

If you're using a deployment platform (like AWS, Azure, or Heroku), check if they support automated rollback on failure ......you might be able to hook into those features.

So yes — automated rollbacks are possible, but you'll need to build that logic into your workflow using custom steps or scripts that reverse the deployment if something goes wrong.

[Rod-at-DOH]

@FaithMutua-code thank you for your reply! I consider your answer to be excellent and after I post my follow-up comments.

I've thought that something like this might be possible, although I wasn't aware of the fact that GitHub Workflows had a continue-on-error: true command. That, in itself, is awesome!

I've thought of using Git Tags to mark when a major release happens. I've used Git Tags at the command line to mark an important change in my code. I'm aware of GitHub's creating a tag in the repo related to a release, although I haven't use it. Nevertheless, I think we could use that sort of as a poor man's red-green deployment. What has developed at work over several years working with TFS, is a team will create a deployment, the copy it to a folder where it is to be run. They'll copy the previous deployment into a new folder named by the date and initials of the person doing the deployment as the name of the new folder. So, consequently we've got several applications with 50 or so of these folders that are of old deployments. My problem with that is I've no idea what any of them have in them as a folder with a date and initials doesn't convey anything. That's why I prefer using Git Tags in some fashion. Also, here at work cloud adoption is VERY SLOW!!!. More than 95% of our apps all run on-prem and I don't see that changing for years to come.

[Ibrahim-techi]

One thing I’d add: before building an automatic rollback, it helps to test whether the PR is rollback-ready before it ever merges. I maintain a small OSS GitHub Action called RevertProof that simulates the merge, runs validation, performs a synthetic revert, and runs post-revert checks. It does not replace deployment rollback, but it catches “this PR cannot be cleanly reverted” earlier in review:
https://github.com/Ibrahim-techi/revertproof