Deployments with native builds

We've released native builds for deployments as part of our ongoing effort to improve the reliability of our deployments.

What's new

Native builds use our own build server infrastructure instead of third-party providers. Deployments will work the same as before, just more reliably.

Using native builds with the CLI

Deploy with native builds using the --native-build-server flag:

Build logs are streamed directly to the dashboard in real-time, so you can monitor progress of your deployments.

If you prefer to trigger a deployment without waiting for it to complete, use the --detach flag:

Using native builds with the GitHub app

If you're using our GitHub integration for automatic deployments, you can enable native builds from your project's build settings page. Navigate to Settings > Build Settings and enable the Use native build server option.

Under the hood

How it works

1. Context archiving: The CLI packages your deployment files into an archive, respecting .gitignore rules
2. Artifact upload: The archive is uploaded to our infrastructure via a pre-signed S3 URL
3. Server-side build: Our build server downloads the deployment artifact, installs dependencies and builds the container image
4. Event streaming: Build logs stream back to both the CLI and dashboard in real-time

Deployments to the same environment are queued, only one build per environment runs at a time.

Caching

We use AWS ECR as a cache backend to speed up your builds. Image layers are cached between deployments, so subsequent builds only need to rebuild what's changed.

Build caches are isolated across tenants using IAM policies in ECR.

Why native builds matter

This change is an important step in our infrastructure roadmap:

• Reliability: Removes dependency on external build providers, reducing points of failure
• Control: Allows us to optimize the build process and integrate tighter with the rest of our infrastructure
• Performance: Opens the door for future build optimizations specific to our platform

Requirements

Native builds require version 4.2.0 or later. Update your packages:

What's next

Native builds will eventually become the default deployment method. We're continuing to optimize build times and reliability as we roll this out more broadly.