Atomic deploys in Trigger.dev allow you to synchronize the deployment of your application with a specific version of your tasks. This ensures that your application always uses the correct version of its associated tasks, preventing inconsistencies or errors due to version mismatches.

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How it works

Atomic deploys achieve synchronization by deploying your tasks to Trigger.dev without promoting them to the default version. Instead, you explicitly specify the deployed task version in your application’s environment. Here’s the process at a glance:

  1. Deploy Tasks to Trigger.dev: Use the Trigger.dev CLI to deploy your tasks with the --skip-promotion flag. This creates a new task version without making it the default.
  2. Capture the Deployment Version: The CLI outputs the version of the deployed tasks, which you’ll use in the next step.
  3. Deploy Your Application: Deploy your application (e.g., to Vercel), setting an environment variable like TRIGGER_VERSION to the captured task version.

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Vercel CLI & GitHub Actions

If you deploy to Vercel via their CLI, you can use this sample workflow that demonstrates performing atomic deploys with GitHub Actions, Trigger.dev, and Vercel:

name: Deploy to Trigger.dev (prod)
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
concurrency:
  group: ${{ github.workflow }}
  cancel-in-progress: true
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Use Node.js 20.x
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: "20.x"

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm install

      - name: Deploy Trigger.dev
        id: deploy-trigger
        env:
          TRIGGER_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.TRIGGER_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
        run: |
          npx trigger.dev@latest deploy --skip-promotion

      - name: Deploy to Vercel
        run: npx vercel --yes --prod -e TRIGGER_VERSION=$TRIGGER_VERSION --token $VERCEL_TOKEN
        env:
          VERCEL_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
          TRIGGER_VERSION: ${{ steps.deploy-trigger.outputs.deploymentVersion }}

      - name: Promote Trigger.dev Version
        if: false
        run: npx trigger.dev@latest promote $TRIGGER_VERSION
        env:
          TRIGGER_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.TRIGGER_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          TRIGGER_VERSION: ${{ steps.deploy-trigger.outputs.deploymentVersion }}

  • Deploy to Trigger.dev

    • The npx trigger.dev deploy command uses --skip-promotion to deploy the tasks without setting the version as the default.
    • The step’s id: deploy-trigger allows us to capture the deployment version in the output (deploymentVersion).

  • Deploy to Vercel:

    • The npx vercel command deploys the application, setting the TRIGGER_VERSION environment variable to the task version from the previous step.
    • The —prod flag ensures a production deployment, and -e passes the environment variable.
    • The @trigger.dev/sdk automatically uses the TRIGGER_VERSION environment variable to trigger the correct version of the tasks.

For this workflow to work, you need to set up the following secrets in your GitHub repository:

  • TRIGGER_ACCESS_TOKEN: Your Trigger.dev personal access token. View the instructions here to learn more.
  • VERCEL_TOKEN: Your Vercel personal access token. You can find this in your Vercel account settings.

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Vercel GitHub integration

If you’re are using Vercel, chances are you are using their GitHub integration and deploying your application directly from pushes to GitHub. This section covers how to achieve atomic deploys with Trigger.dev in this setup.

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Turn off automatic promotion

By default, Vercel automatically promotes new deployments to production. To prevent this, you need to disable the auto-promotion feature in your Vercel project settings:

  1. Go to your Production environment settings in Vercel at https://vercel.com/<team-slug>/<project-slug>/settings/environments/production
  2. Disable the “Auto-assign Custom Production Domains” setting:

  1. Hit the “Save” button to apply the changes.

Now whenever you push to your main branch, Vercel will deploy your application to the production environment without promoting it, and you can control the promotion manually.

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Deploy with Trigger.dev

Now we want to deploy that same commit to Trigger.dev, and then promote the Vercel deployment when that completes. Here’s a sample GitHub Actions workflow that does this:

name: Deploy to Trigger.dev (prod)

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

concurrency:
  group: ${{ github.workflow }}
  cancel-in-progress: true

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Use Node.js 20.x
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: "20.x"

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm install

      - name: Wait for vercel deployment (push)
        id: wait-for-vercel
        uses: ludalex/vercel-wait@v1
        with:
          project-id: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_PROJECT_ID }}
          team-id: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_SCOPE_NAME }}
          token: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
          sha: ${{ github.sha }}

      - name: 🚀 Deploy Trigger.dev
        id: deploy-trigger
        env:
          TRIGGER_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.TRIGGER_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
        run: |
          npx trigger.dev@latest deploy

      - name: Promote Vercel deploy
        run: npx vercel promote $VERCEL_DEPLOYMENT_ID --yes --token $VERCEL_TOKEN --scope $VERCEL_SCOPE_NAME
        env:
          VERCEL_DEPLOYMENT_ID: ${{ steps.wait-for-vercel.outputs.deployment-id }}
          VERCEL_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN }}
          VERCEL_SCOPE_NAME: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_SCOPE_NAME }}

This workflow does the following:

  1. Waits for the Vercel deployment to complete using the ludalex/vercel-wait action.
  2. Deploys the tasks to Trigger.dev using the npx trigger.dev deploy command. There’s no need to use the --skip-promotion flag because we want to promote the deployment.
  3. Promotes the Vercel deployment using the npx vercel promote command.

For this workflow to work, you need to set up the following secrets in your GitHub repository:

  • TRIGGER_ACCESS_TOKEN: Your Trigger.dev personal access token. View the instructions here to learn more.
  • VERCEL_TOKEN: Your Vercel personal access token. You can find this in your Vercel account settings.
  • VERCEL_PROJECT_ID: Your Vercel project ID. You can find this in your Vercel project settings.
  • VERCEL_SCOPE_NAME: Your Vercel team slug.

Checkout our example repo to see this workflow in action.

We are using the ludalex/vercel-wait action above as a fork of the official tj-actions/vercel-wait action because there is a bug in the official action that exits early if the deployment isn’t found in the first check and due to the fact that it supports treating skipped (cancelled) Vercel deployments as valid (on by default). I’ve opened a PR for this issue here.