docs/content/rest/deployments/deployments.md

title, intro, versions, topics, miniTocMaxHeadingLevel

title	intro	versions	topics	miniTocMaxHeadingLevel
Deployments	The Deployments API allows you to create and delete deployments and deployment environments.	fpt ghes ghae ghec * * * *	API	3

Deployments are requests to deploy a specific ref (branch, SHA, tag). GitHub dispatches a deployment event that external services can listen for and act on when new deployments are created. Deployments enable developers and organizations to build loosely coupled tooling around deployments, without having to worry about the implementation details of delivering different types of applications (e.g., web, native).

Deployment statuses allow external services to mark deployments with an error, failure, pending, in_progress, queued, or success state that systems listening to deployment_status events can consume.

Deployment statuses can also include an optional description and log_url, which are highly recommended because they make deployment statuses more useful. The log_url is the full URL to the deployment output, and the description is a high-level summary of what happened with the deployment.

GitHub dispatches deployment and deployment_status events when new deployments and deployment statuses are created. These events allows third-party integrations to receive respond to deployment requests and update the status of a deployment as progress is made.

Below is a simple sequence diagram for how these interactions would work.

+---------+             +--------+            +-----------+        +-------------+
| Tooling |             | GitHub |            | 3rd Party |        | Your Server |
+---------+             +--------+            +-----------+        +-------------+
     |                      |                       |                     |
     |  Create Deployment   |                       |                     |
     |--------------------->|                       |                     |
     |                      |                       |                     |
     |  Deployment Created  |                       |                     |
     |<---------------------|                       |                     |
     |                      |                       |                     |
     |                      |   Deployment Event    |                     |
     |                      |---------------------->|                     |
     |                      |                       |     SSH+Deploys     |
     |                      |                       |-------------------->|
     |                      |                       |                     |
     |                      |   Deployment Status   |                     |
     |                      |<----------------------|                     |
     |                      |                       |                     |
     |                      |                       |   Deploy Completed  |
     |                      |                       |<--------------------|
     |                      |                       |                     |
     |                      |   Deployment Status   |                     |
     |                      |<----------------------|                     |
     |                      |                       |                     |

Keep in mind that GitHub is never actually accessing your servers. It's up to your third-party integration to interact with deployment events. Multiple systems can listen for deployment events, and it's up to each of those systems to decide whether they're responsible for pushing the code out to your servers, building native code, etc.

Note that the repo_deployment OAuth scope grants targeted access to deployments and deployment statuses without granting access to repository code, while the {% ifversion not ghae %}public_repo and{% endif %}repo scopes grant permission to code as well.

Inactive deployments

When you set the state of a deployment to success, then all prior non-transient, non-production environment deployments in the same repository with the same environment name will become inactive. To avoid this, you can set auto_inactive to false when creating the deployment status.

You can communicate that a transient environment no longer exists by setting its state to inactive. Setting the state to inactive shows the deployment as destroyed in {% data variables.product.prodname_dotcom %} and removes access to it.