What Is a Rollback? Reverting to a Known Good State

A rollback is the process of reverting your application to a previous known-good version. Instead of debugging the current broken state, you restore an earlier deployment and investigate the issue calmly.

Rollback on Fly.io

Fly keeps a deployment history. To see recent releases:

fly releases

To roll back to a specific release:

fly deploy --image <previous-image>

Or use fly undo to revert to the immediately previous release:

fly undo

OpenClaw Rollbacks

OpenClaw stores its configuration at /etc/openclaw/config.json in the VM and copies it to /data/openclaw.json on first boot. To roll back config, you'd need to redeploy with the previous config — so keep your openclaw.json in Git.

When to Roll Back

Roll back immediately if:

• New deployment causes error rate to spike
• Core functionality is broken
• Latency increases significantly

Roll back after diagnosing if:

• Issue is minor and a fix is straightforward
• Rollback itself carries risk (data migration already run, etc.)

Preventing the Need to Roll Back

Always test in a staging environment. Use canary releases for risky changes. Monitor your app post-deploy — set up Sentry or similar to alert you to increased error rates.