Deploy Checklist

Deploy Checklist Skill

Trigger

Load this skill when a dev is about to deploy or has just deployed:

• "We're deploying to production"
• "Pre-deploy check"
• "Post-deploy verification"
• "Run the deploy checklist"
• "Is it safe to deploy?"

Do NOT use this skill for: committing code (use git-os), creating a PR (use pr-create), or planning a project (use greenfield). This skill only applies at the deployment stage — code is already merged.

Run this checklist before and after every production deployment.

Pre-Deploy Checklist

• [ ] All CI checks green on the deploy branch
• [ ] Environment variables verified in target environment (no missing keys)
• [ ] Database migrations reviewed — irreversible migrations documented
• [ ] Migrations have been dry-run or tested in staging
• [ ] Rollback plan documented: what to revert and how
• [ ] Feature flags set correctly for the release
• [ ] Downstream services notified if API contracts changed
• [ ] Changelog updated with this release's changes
• [ ] Deployment window confirmed (avoid peak traffic)

Deploy

• [ ] Deploy initiated with correct branch / tag
• [ ] Deployment logs monitored in real time
• [ ] No unexpected errors during startup

Post-Deploy Checklist

• [ ] Smoke test: critical user flows verified manually or via synthetic monitoring
• [ ] Health check endpoint returns 200
• [ ] Error rate in monitoring (Datadog, Grafana, Sentry) is normal
• [ ] No spike in latency or DB query time
• [ ] Monitoring alerts reviewed — no new alerts triggered
• [ ] Changelog published / communicated to stakeholders
• [ ] Ticket status updated (closed / released)

Rollback Trigger Criteria

Initiate rollback immediately if:

• Error rate rises above 1% of requests
• P95 latency increases by more than 2x baseline
• Any data integrity issue detected
• Critical feature path returns 5xx

Tools

| Action | Tool |

|--------|------|

| Run lint, test, build scripts | Bash |

| Check health endpoint | Bash — curl -s <url>/health |

| Read config or env files | Read |

| Check CI status | Bash — gh run list or gh pr checks |

Notes

• Never deploy on Fridays unless it's a critical hotfix
• Always have a second engineer available during production deploys
• Document the actual deploy time and outcome in the ticket