Reboot, roll back or restart, with a swipe and Face ID

The 13 actions

The list is the set of things worth doing from a phone at night: restore service, contain damage, or take a safety copy. Anything that creates, resizes or deletes stays on the laptop.

Every row then asks for Face ID or your passcode. "Add my IP" is the one action that needs a lookup outside DigitalOcean: the app asks the Duskwatch server for your public IPv4 address, which that server neither logs nor stores, or you type one in; then it adds the address to the cluster's trusted sources.

One sheet names the action, the resource and the team

Before anything runs, one confirmation sheet says exactly what will happen, to what, and where. The team chip matters most when you look after several teams: "in acme-prod" is the line that stops you rebooting a client's web-01 instead of your own.

A swipe for anything disruptive, then Face ID every time

A button can be hit by a thumb reaching for something else. A swipe across a track cannot. Shut down, power off, reboot, power cycle, roll back and revert rollback all use a swipe, and the label always ends with the resource name: "Swipe to roll back api-prod". There is no setting to turn the swipe off.

Face ID or your passcode follows every action, routine or not, right before the request goes to DigitalOcean. The request goes straight from your iPhone to DigitalOcean; the alert server never runs an action and cannot, because its permission can only read.

Shut down, power off, reboot or power cycle: which to use

Start gentle. A shutdown or reboot lets the operating system close files and stop services. Use power off or power cycle when the droplet no longer answers, and know that it is the same as cutting power to a server.

• A shutdown is an attempt to shut the droplet down gracefully, like running the shutdown command from its console.

  doctl reference: droplet-action shutdown (external link) · , verified 2 October 2026

• A reboot is an attempt to reboot the droplet gracefully, like running the reboot command from its console.

  doctl reference: droplet-action reboot (external link) · , verified 2 October 2026

• A power off is a hard shutdown, similar to cutting the power, and should only be used if a shutdown does not work. Powered-off droplets are still billable.

  doctl reference: droplet-action power-off (external link) · , verified 2 October 2026

• A power cycle is similar to pushing the reset button on a physical machine.

  doctl reference: droplet-action power-cycle (external link) · , verified 2 October 2026

• You can snapshot a running droplet, but DigitalOcean warns that doing so may degrade performance and compromise data consistency.

  DigitalOcean docs: snapshot droplets (external link) · , verified 2 October 2026

Roll back, then commit or revert

When a release breaks api-prod, rolling back to the last good deployment is usually the fastest way back to a working app. A rollback is a state you leave on purpose: commit it to keep the old version and resume deploys, or revert it once the fix is ready. Until then, the app shows "Pinned to a rollback: pushes won't deploy", so a quiet failure to ship does not surprise you the next day.

• You can roll back to any of the ten most recent successful deployments; a rollback restores code, configuration and app spec but does not affect database data.

  DigitalOcean docs: manage deployments (external link) · , verified 2 October 2026

• By default, a rollback pins the app to that deployment, and no new deployment is created, manually or by Auto Deploy on Push, until the rollback is committed or reverted.

  DigitalOcean docs: create an app rollback (external link) · , verified 2 October 2026

• Reverting creates a new deployment from the latest app spec before the rollback and unpins the app.

  DigitalOcean docs: revert an app rollback (external link) · , verified 2 October 2026

When actions are off

• Offline: actions are disabled until the app can reach DigitalOcean, so nothing queues up to run later.
• Without the permission: sign-in asks only to view. Actions need "Enable actions", a separate permission you approve on DigitalOcean's page. How sign-in works.
• Never deletes: there is no destroy, delete or resize anywhere in the app.