Stop, restart and pause the app in App Platform | Voters

Stop, restart and pause the app in App Platform

complete

Ivo Dimitrov

There is no way to stop, restart or pause the app. For the maintenance needs, it's something that we need all the time.

July 25, 2023

Awais Malik

marked this post as

complete

We are happy to share that we now support all aspects of this request (i.e. Stopping, restarting, and pausing the Apps) on App Platform and you can read more about this here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/maintenance-mode/
Restart App: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/restart-rebuild-app/
Stopping app:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/#17-march-2025
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/archive-restore/
If you need any help or have any questions around this, please reach out to our support team at https://cloudsupport.digitalocean.com/s/ 
Thank you again!

Awais Malik

marked this post as

open

Awais Malik

marked this post as

complete

Thank you so much for taking the time to share this excellent feedback with us. Based on this feedback, we now support parts of this request (App restarts and Maintenance Mode) on App Platform and you can read more about this here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/maintenance-mode/
Restart App: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/restart-rebuild-app/
If you need any help getting started, please reach out to our support team at https://cloudsupport.digitalocean.com/s/ 
Thank you again for your feedback and we hope you continue to share your needs with us.

Bartosz Blimke

Awais Malik thank you for the news. It’s great that you support maintenance pages. However I don’t see how that solves the problem of not being able to stop and restart various app components and processes. Please also note that it’s not only about web components. I find marking this as complete with maintenance page support quite confusing and inadequate.

Awais Malik

Bartosz Blimke Thanks for the follow-up and we appreciate the feedback. Please find the guide for Restarting apps here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/restart-rebuild-app/
Could you kindly elaborate further on below point so that we can understand the context in a better way?
"it’s not only about web components"

Bartosz Blimke

Awais Malik thank you. I was not aware of that "Restart" feature. That seems to solve the "restart" part. Therefore I guess the only missing part of this feature request is "stop/pause". The maintenance page prevents access to the web component only. How can I temporarily stop or turn off a worker component that is used for offline jobs? E.g. on Heroku I would achieve the same by reducing the number of dynos to 0.

Awais Malik

Bartosz Blimke Thanks for getting back in touch. To get further assistance on your question and direct support from the App Platform team, please reach out via a Support ticket at https://cloudsupport.digitalocean.com/s/.

Bartosz Blimke

Awais Malik thanks for the response. I don't really need support. I wanted to clarify that the "Stop" functionality, manifested in this this "Idea" title, is not supported for worker components, therefore the scope of this feature request is not completely finished.

Awais Malik

Bartosz Blimke Thanks for getting back to us and for raising that! While our internal teams work on the features requested, we have the Idea set to 'Open' to reflect that it is not completed at the moment.

sai anudeep

Any update on this feature? This could turn out to be a blocker for us.

Ability to stop, restart and start an app should be a day 1 problem.

Adam Leviton

Sounds like this is heading in the right direction. I would like to see:

A way to stop the app from being billed but can also be either easily started again or recreated. This would prevent me from constantly having to manually create a staging app every time I want to test something. Droplet snapshots work OK for this case.
A way to automatically restart the app if memory, etc. exceeds a certain threshold or a certain condition occurs. Maybe even scheduled reboots?

Jim Johnston

If I'm using an app for testing, I don't want to pay for resources when I'm not using it, currently the only option is to destroy the app and reconfigure a new one when it comes to testing again, not a fun experience. This would be a great feature, thanks!

Also if I deploy something which is causing some bad side effect (such as an infinite loop to a database) I'd like to stop the component, rather than destroying it.

Bikram Gupta

Ivo Dimitrov Zeta King Derek Marler Ross Shawn McHenry Soheil Saheb-Jamii Kyle Schmolze Roman Sentsov Max Carlson bemo Yoan Ian Manuel Alves Manuel Calum Knott

Thank you for your feedback. Tagging some of you who commented in the last 4 months. For context, I am the PM for App Platform.

I wanted to confirm the use case behind each of the features. Appreciate your feedback and any additional details you can provide.

Pause: Pause the network access (for end users) for the app. App is still live for troubleshooting etc. Billing continues.
Stop the app: Delete the live app, but not the app configuration (appspec) and associated databases. Need it for stopping the app when you do not need it, but want to be able to use it later without rebuilding. Billing happens for the database, and a reduced fee (images, maintenance resources).
Restart the app: Restart the network access for a paused app. Restart the app container(s) for a live app. Recreate the stopped/deleted app.

Shawn McHenry

Bikram Gupta Those use cases match what I'd be looking for in the feature.

Ben

Bikram Gupta

Stop the App: I think the codebase (not sure if this is part of the mentioned appspec) should also remain and not be removed/cleared. Otherwise, a "start" after a "stop" might retrieve the codebase again, but maybe in a different state than the administrator is directly aware of.
Pause: just the wording is a bit confusing - perhaps call it somewhere like "disconnect" or "isolate"... I'd expect the app is in a "frozen" state with this wording. Very useful feature however!

Bikram Gupta

Hi, thank you for your patience. We now have the archive/restore feature (equivalent to stop/start) available (10/21/2024) in closed beta. If you haven't already received an email about this, I'd be happy to enable it for you. Please DM me at bgupta@digitalocean.com with your DigitalOcean account email ID.
Configuration is fairly simple via appspec. For example:
name: sample-golang
maintenance:
archive: true
Maintenance mode will be coming soon.

Bikram Gupta

sai anudeep Adam Leviton FYI above.

Zeta King

what about this feature? is very important, and please make restart and pausa recallable via API or something like so ..

Zeta King

what about this feature? is very important, and please make restart and pausa recallable via API or something like so ..

Derek Marler

I had an app stuck in a connection loop and while I could perhaps look up the process to close, being able to just restart the server would have been preferred.

So please, this!

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