Deploy Hooks

Deploy hooks enable you to trigger an on-demand deploy of your Render service with a single HTTP request.

Each service has a secret deploy hook URL, available from its Settings tab in the Render Dashboard:

To trigger a deploy, send a basic GET or POST request to your service’s deploy hook URL—no special headers are required.

curl https://api.render.com/deploy/srv-xyz…

Use cases

Use deploy hooks to trigger deploys from:

• CI/CD environments like GitHub Actions (see an example)
• Render cron jobs (to redeploy your service on a regular schedule)
• Headless CMS systems like Contentful

Using with GitHub Actions

You might want to trigger a service deploy from your CI/CD environment whenever certain conditions are met (such as when all of your tests pass). Let’s set this up using deploy hooks and GitHub Actions.

1. Create a repository secret

Deploy hook URLs are secret values, so we need to make sure to store ours as a secret in our GitHub repo:

1. Go to your GitHub repo’s Settings page.
2. Click Secrets and variables > Actions.
3. Click New repository secret. Create a secret with the name RENDER_DEPLOY_HOOK_URL and provide your deploy hook URL as the value.

2. Add a GitHub workflow

Now that we’ve added our deploy hook URL, let’s create a GitHub workflow that uses it:

1. Create a .github/workflows directory in your repo if it doesn’t already exist. GitHub Actions automatically detects and runs any workflows defined in this folder.
2. Add a YAML file to this directory to represent your new workflow. The example below uses the file path .github/workflows/ci.yml.
3. Define logic in your workflow to trigger a deploy after any prerequisite steps succeed. See the example.
4. Commit all of your changes.

Example workflow

This example workflow defines a job named ci that includes two steps (Test and Deploy). The workflow runs whenever any pull request is opened against main, or when commits are pushed to main.

1. The Test step runs the repo’s defined unit tests.
2. The Deploy step executes a curl request to our deploy hook URL only if the current branch is main and the Test step succeeded.

# .github/workflows/ci.yml

on:
  pull_request:
  push:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  ci:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Test
        run: |
          npm install
          npm run test

      - name: Deploy
        # Only run this step if the branch is main
        if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
        env:
          deploy_url: ${{ secrets.RENDER_DEPLOY_HOOK_URL }}
        run: |
          curl "$deploy_url"