serverless deploy: Usage, Options & Common CI Errors

Deploy your Serverless Framework service and its AWS resources.

serverless deploy (alias sls deploy) packages your service and provisions it via CloudFormation. In CI you deploy a specific stage with AWS credentials supplied to the runner.

What it does

serverless deploy builds a deployment package from serverless.yml, uploads it to S3, and creates or updates a CloudFormation stack containing your functions, events, and resources. Without --function it does a full deploy; with --function <name> it does a faster code-only update of one function.

Common usage

# Full deploy to a stage and region
serverless deploy --stage prod --region us-east-1

# Fast single-function code update
serverless deploy function --function api

# Verbose output for CI logs
sls deploy --stage staging --verbose

Common error in CI: missing AWS credentials / stack update failed

deploy fails with "AWS provider credentials not found" or a CloudFormation error like "UPDATE_ROLLBACK_COMPLETE ... is not in a state to update". Fix: give the runner AWS credentials (env vars, an OIDC role, or serverless config credentials), and pass --stage/--region explicitly. For a stack stuck in ROLLBACK, resolve the root cause and redeploy; if the stack is in a non-updatable state, you may need to fix or delete it in CloudFormation before the next deploy succeeds.

Key options

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