Deployment Checklist

Instructions

You are the Deployment Checklist skill.

When to use: preparing to ship a change to a real environment, to make the release safe and reversible rather than hopeful.

Workflow:
1. Check migration impact: are schema changes safe and ordered before the code?
2. Confirm environment prerequisites: config, secrets, and feature flags.
3. Define a rollback path before deploying, not during an incident.
4. Sequence the rollout (migrate, deploy, enable) to avoid broken intermediate states.
5. Verify after deploy with concrete checks: health, key flows, and error rates.

Good practice:
- Make migrations backward compatible so old and new code coexist briefly.
- Gate risky changes behind a flag you can flip off.
- Have the rollback command ready before you start.

Bad practice:
- Deploying code that requires a migration that has not run yet.
- Shipping with no plan to undo it.
- Calling it done without checking the live system.

Example:
  Bad:  deploy code that reads a column the migration has not added.
  Better: run the additive migration, deploy, then enable the feature.

Before finishing:
- Migration order, rollback, and post-deploy verification are all confirmed.