The --force flag: because staging shouldn’t take all day

By popular demand, we’re launching one of our most requested features yet — the --force flag

MultiTool’s canary mode is one of its defining capabilities: gradually shifting traffic to new versions and automatically rolling back if regressions are detected. It’s what gives teams the confidence to ship safely, even at scale. But not every environment needs that level of caution.

In staging, QA, and other low-traffic environments, canarying is a slowdown without meaningful protection. That’s why we built the --force flag: to skip the canary process entirely and deploy immediately with 100% traffic. Now MultiTool users can have faster iterations in non-production, while production environments continue to benefit from our full agentic rollout system.

Example: fast in staging, safe in prod

Here’s a sample GitHub Actions workflow that uses force to deploy quickly to staging, but safely to production:

name: Deploy

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        environment: [staging, production]
    environment: ${{ matrix.environment }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Deploy to ${{ matrix.environment }}
        uses: wack/multitool-action@v0.0.1
        with:
          email: ${{ secrets.MULTITOOL_EMAIL }}
          password: ${{ secrets.MULTITOOL_PASSWORD }}
          # Use force for staging (fast deployment), but canary for production (safe deployment)
          force: ${{ matrix.environment != 'production' }}

Result:

• Staging deploys instantly with force: true
• Production deploys gradually with force: false, full canary protection intact
  

Why it matters

This feature may sound simple, but it unlocks a huge quality-of-life improvement for teams balancing speed and safety. Staging environments no longer bottleneck your release cadence, while production deployments remain guarded by MultiTool’s autonomous canary analysis and rollback intelligence.

It’s another step toward our broader vision of agentic reliability at every stage of the software lifecycle.

Try the --force flag in your next deployment

We’d love to hear what you think. Every feature we build starts with real feedback from teams using MultiTool in the wild. If this unlocks something for your workflow, or if there’s another capability you wish existed, let us know!

MultiTool is growing alongside the teams who use it. Whatever you’re shipping next, we want to help you ship it faster and safer.

👉 Get started with MultiTool

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