# Self-Healing CI: Recovering a DNS Rebind During Deploy

> A deploy step that fails because a hostname briefly resolved to a stale or changing address is a DNS-propagation blip, not a wrong target. See the manual fix and how self-healing CI re-resolves and retries.

Source: https://latchkey.dev/learn/self-healing-ci/self-healing-dns-rebind-during-deploy  
Updated: 2026-06-26

A deploy that fails because a hostname briefly resolved to a stale or in-flux address hit a DNS-propagation blip, not a wrong target -- re-resolving and retrying clears it.

## What makes a failure safely retryable

Automatic retry is only correct for failures that are genuinely transient. Retrying a deterministic failure wastes minutes and hides a real defect, so the classification matters more than the retry mechanism.

- Safe to retry: network timeouts, registry 5xx, transient DNS failures, a service container that was not ready, a spot instance reclaimed mid-run.
- Not safe to retry: assertion failures, compile errors, lint violations, anything that fails identically on every attempt.
- Ambiguous, and worth investigating rather than retrying: out-of-memory kills, disk exhaustion, and flaky tests. These repeat under load and a retry only hides the trend.
- Always record that a retry happened. A pipeline that silently retries is a pipeline whose real failure rate you do not know.

## FAQ

### What causes Self-Healing CI: recovering a DNS rebind during deploy?

A deploy step fails because a hostname resolved to a stale or changing address during a cutover -- a record was being updated, or a cached entry pointed at an endpoint that was draining. The intended target is correct; DNS was briefly in flux. A human re-runs after propagation and the deploy reaches the right endpoint unchanged.

### How do I fix Self-Healing CI: recovering a DNS rebind during deploy manually?

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### Can Self-Healing CI: recovering a DNS rebind during deploy be fixed automatically?

A DNS rebind during deploy has a recognizable transient signature -- a resolution failure or a stale address during a cutover rather than a permanently wrong target -- and the safe response is to re-resolve and retry.

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Latchkey runs CI/CD that repairs its own failures. Agent entry points: https://latchkey.dev/agent.txt, https://latchkey.dev/openapi.json, https://latchkey.dev/llms.txt