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Runtime operations allow you to trigger one-off commands or scripts on your project. Similar to crons, they run in the app container but not on a specific schedule. You can define runtime operations in your app configuration and trigger them at any time through the Upsun CLI. For example, if you have a static website, you may want to set up a runtime operation to occasionally fetch content from a backend system without having to rebuild your whole app.

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Define a runtime operation

To define a runtime operation, add a configuration similar to the following: When you define a runtime operation, you can specify which users can trigger it according to their user role:
  • viewer
  • contributor
  • admin
If you don’t set the role option when configuring your runtime operation, by default all users with the contributor role can trigger it. For example, to allow admin users to clear the cache of a Drupal site, you could define an operation like the following: The name of the runtime operation in this case is clear-rebuild. For more possibilities, see other runtime operation examples.

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Run a runtime operation

First, make sure that you have defined a runtime operation. Then:
  1. Navigate to the environment where you want to run the operation.
  2. Click More.
  3. Click Run runtime operation.
  4. Select the operation you want to run.
  5. Click Run.

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List your runtime operations

To list all the runtime operations available on an environment, run the following command: 
upsun operation:list --project <VariableBlock name="PROJECT_ID" /> --environment <VariableBlock name="ENVIRONMENT_NAME" />

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Runtime operation examples

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Build your app when using a static site generator

During every Upsun deployment, a standard build step is run. When you use a static site generator like Gatsby or Next.js with a headless backend you need to run a second build step to get your app ready for production. This is because, as its framework is being built, your frontend needs to pull content-related data from your backend’s API (to generate all the static HTML pages your site is to serve). To accomplish this on Upsun, where each app goes through a build-deploy pipeline in parallel, your frontend’s build must be delayed until after your backend has fully deployed. It’s often delayed up until the post_deploy hook stage, when the filesystem is read-only. You can use a runtime operation to trigger the second build step after the initial deployment of your app or after a redeployment. You can also trigger it when you need to fetch content from your backend but want to avoid going through the whole Upsun build and deploy processes again.
The following examples assume that the frontend and backend containers are included in the same environment. This isn’t necessary for the commands to run successfully.
What is necessary is that the build destination for your frontend is writable at runtime (meaning, you must define a mount for it). If you don’t want to include a build within a mount (especially if your data source isn’t on Upsun), you can use source operations to achieve a similar effect, but through generating a new commit.
To run the Gatsby build step, define a runtime operation similar to the following:
.upsun/config.yaml
applications:
  # The name of the app container. Must be unique within a project.
  myapp:
    # The location of the application's code.

    operations:
      gatsby-build:
        role: viewer
        commands:
          start: gatsby build
To trigger your runtime operation, run a command similar to the following:
upsun operation:run gatsby-build --project <VariableBlock name="PROJECT_ID" /> --environment <VariableBlock name="ENVIRONMENT_NAME" />

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Execute actions on your Node.js app

You can define runtime operations for common pm2 process manager tasks.
To ping your Node.js app, define a runtime operation similar to the following:
.upsun/config.yaml
applications:
  # The name of the app container. Must be unique within a project.
  myapp:
    # The location of the application's code.

    operations:
      pm2-ping:
        role: admin
        commands:
          start: |
            # Assuming pm2 start npm --no-daemon --watch --name $APP -- start -- -p $PORT
            APP=$(cat package.json | jq -r '.name')
            pm2 ping $APP
To trigger your runtime operation, run a command similar to the following:
upsun operation:run pm2-ping --project <VariableBlock name="PROJECT_ID" /> --environment <VariableBlock name="ENVIRONMENT_NAME" />

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Define management commands on your Django project

On a Django project, you can define custom django-admin commands, for example to run a one-off management command (manual migration in the example above) outside of the Django ORM migration framework. To do so, define a runtime operation similar to the following: To trigger your runtime operation, run a command similar to the following: 
upsun operation:run manual-migration --project <VariableBlock name="PROJECT_ID" /> --environment <VariableBlock name="ENVIRONMENT_NAME" />
Last modified on March 11, 2026