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Roll back a Patch

If you discover that a live patch has a bug, Shorebird supports patch roll back. When a patch is rolled back, it is remotely uninstalled from end users’ devices and replaced by either the previous patch or the base release if no previous patch is available.

How to roll back a patch

In the Shorebird Console, navigate to the release that contains the patch you want to roll back. On the right side of the patch row, click the “more” icon (three vertical dots) and select “Rollback”:

The Shorebird Console showing a "roll back patch" button

What happens when a patch is rolled back?

Imagine we have a release with three patches:

The Shorebird Console showing three patches, with patch 3 as the active patch

When a user downloads this release from the store, Shorebird will see that patch 3 is the latest available patch and download it.

If we discover that there is a problem with patch 3, we can roll it back. The Console will look like this after a rollback:

The Shorebird Console showing three patches, with patch 3 rolled back and patch 2 as the active patch

Users who download the app from the store will now get patch 2 instead of patch 3. Users who already had patch 3 installed will be downgraded to patch 2.

Under the hood

When a Shorebird app checks for new patches, the server includes in its response a list of rolled back patches. If the device has any rolled back patches installed, it deletes them and reverts to the last “good” patch, which will be visible the next time the app starts.