Emergency Hotfix

Workflow 5 of 5. Something is down in production right now. This is the calm checklist — not the place to improvise. The whole workflow is built around one idea: get production working again as fast as safely possible, then make the fix permanent so it survives the next release.

First, breathe. Most “emergencies” are smaller than they feel in the moment, and a panicked deploy usually makes things worse. The two pages below give you the only two moves you need: fix forward (patch it) or roll back (restore the last good release).

Is this actually an emergency?

A real emergency is narrow. If it’s not one of these, close this playbook and use Continuous Deploy instead — the normal, staged path is safer.

TRUE emergency (use this workflow)	NOT an emergency (use Continuous Deploy)
Production site is down	A minor UI bug
Data is being corrupted or lost	A feature request from a customer
A security breach in progress	”I want this deployed today”
Payments failing — users can’t pay	Anything that can wait for staging

Fix forward, or roll back?

Once you’ve confirmed it’s real, there’s exactly one decision: can you fix it in under an hour, or do you need production working now? This flow routes you to the right page.

flowchart TD
    A{Production is broken.<br/>Is it a TRUE emergency?} -->|No| N[Use Continuous Deploy]
    A -->|Yes| B{Was it the LAST deploy?}
    B -->|Yes| R[Roll back:<br/>dep rollback — 30 sec]
    B -->|No| C{Can you fix it<br/>in under 1 hour?}
    C -->|Yes| H[Hotfix:<br/>patch and deploy]
    C -->|No| R

The rule of thumb: if the last deploy broke it, roll back first (it’s a 30-second symlink switch), then fix properly afterward. If the breakage is older or you already know the one-line fix, hotfix forward.

The two pages

1 · Hotfix forward Branch from production state, make the minimal fix, fast-track straight to production (skip staging), then back-merge so the fix survives the next release.

2 · Roll back Restore the last good release via the deployer symlink or a known-good tag. When to roll back vs fix forward, plus the database-migration caveat and post-incident steps.

See everything in this collection

Every page in this CodeCanyon topic lives under /tech-stack/laravel/codecanyon/ — the exhaustive cross-shelf index. The actor legend (🤖 Agent · 👤 User · 🔀 both) lives in the collection overview.

Ready? Start with the fix-forward path — it links straight to rollback if the fix can’t land in time:

→Start here

Hotfix forward