helm rollback: Revert Releases in CI

Roll a release back to a previous revision from its history.

helm rollback restores a release to an earlier revision recorded in its history. In CI it is the manual or automated rescue when a deploy goes bad and you are not using --atomic. Use helm history to find the revision to roll back to.

Common flags

RELEASE [REVISION] - release and target revision (0/omitted = previous)
-n NAMESPACE - release namespace
--wait --timeout=DURATION - block until rolled-back resources are ready
helm history RELEASE - list revisions to choose from

Example in CI

Roll back to the previous good revision.

shell

helm rollback api 0 -n prod --wait --timeout 300s

Common errors in CI

Error: release: not found - wrong release name or namespace
Error: ... has no deployed releases - release never reached a deployed state
Error: ... revision ... not found - target revision out of range or pruned

Key takeaways

Reverts a release to a prior revision from its history.
Use helm history to pick the revision; 0 means the previous one.
Prefer --atomic upgrades to make rollback automatic on failure.