Skip to main content

​
Manage your app

Your app’s page in the console carries everything you do to an app after it is created. Seven controls, and two separate places logs appear. Some of them change what you are charged and some of them do not. Two of the confirmations tell you so, the rest say nothing about money at all, and you only read the two after you have already pressed the control. So each control below gets two answers in the same order: what it does, then what it does to your bill. This page covers all seven controls and both log surfaces. Controls appear here in the order the console renders them: the buttons in the app header first, then the ones inside the More actions menu at the end of that row. Two buttons in that row do not act on the running app and are not covered here. Edit opens the app’s settings. Top up to resume appears only when an app has been suspended for lack of credit, and it takes you to your wallet.

​
Deploy and Redeploy

The first button in the header. On an app that has never deployed it reads Deploy. Once a deployment exists it reads Redeploy, and while a build is running it reads Deploying… and cannot be pressed. Pressing it builds your repository again from your deploy branch and replaces the running container with the result. Your app keeps serving the old container until the new one is ready. What it does to your bill: nothing, on an app that has already been charged for the current period. No new charge, no refund, and the paid period runs on exactly as before. You can redeploy as often as you like. A first deploy is the exception, and it is the only one. An app with a monthly price is charged when it first deploys, not when you create it. If your wallet cannot cover that first charge, the deploy is refused and no money moves.

​
Stop

While your app is running, a Stop button sits beside Redeploy in the same row. Pressing it opens a short confirmation headed Stop this app?, and the button that carries it out reads Stop app. Your app goes offline. Its address stops answering, its container is stopped, and nothing about your repository, your settings or your environment variables changes. It is a pause, not a deletion. What it does to your bill: stopping stops the charge. A stopped app leaves the billing run entirely, so nothing at all accrues while it is stopped. The confirmation says the same thing before you press it, and it is right.

​
Start

Once your app is stopped, Start takes the place of Stop in the same row. It brings the container back on the plan the app is currently on. What it does to your bill, and this is the good news the console never tells you: starting again moves the end of your paid period forward by exactly the time the app spent stopped. The start of the period does not move. A pause therefore costs you no paid time at all: whatever you had left when you stopped is what you have left when you start. An app that has never been charged has no paid period to move, so starting it changes nothing.

​
Restart

In the More actions menu. It bounces your app’s container in place: same image, same build, no rebuild and no clone. Use it when your app is misbehaving rather than when your code has changed. For new code, use Redeploy. What it does to your bill: nothing. A running app’s paid period keeps running straight through a restart.

​
Change plan

In the More actions menu. It opens a dialog listing the plans you can move to, with your current one marked, and your wallet balance beside them. What it does to your bill: nothing at the moment you change it. No charge, no refund, no proration. The new price applies from your next billing cycle, and the dialog says the same thing where you press the button. What happens straight away is the resource limits. A running app restarts briefly to take up the new ones, so expect a few seconds of downtime. A stopped app records the new plan and takes up its limits the next time you start it.

​
Delete

Last in the More actions menu, on its own below a divider. It opens a confirmation naming your app and warning that the action cannot be undone. Your container, your image, your deployment logs and the app’s own record all go. What it does to your bill, and the confirmation now says so: billing ends immediately, and the paid remainder of the current period is not refunded. Both halves are true at once. You stop being charged from the moment you delete, and the days you have already paid for are not credited back to your wallet. A new app starts with no paid period of its own. So if you delete an app and create a new one afterwards, even with the same name and the same repository, its first deploy charges the full plan price again. That is a second payment for a plan you already paid for once. If an app’s deploy failed, fix the cause and press Deploy again from the app page instead of deleting and re-creating it. If what you want is to stop paying for an app you may come back to, Stop is the control for that, not Delete. A stopped app is not charged, and the paid time you have left waits for you.

​
Where your logs are

There is no Logs control. Open the Deployments tab and you get two sub-tabs, Deployment logs and Runtime logs. They are different places and neither one contains the other.
  • Deployment logs is the build. It is everything that happened while PivoCloud cloned your repository and built your image, and the panel beneath the sub-tab is headed Deployment Logs. If a deploy never produced a running container, the reason is here.
  • Runtime logs is your app talking, live, once it is running. It is what your process writes while it serves traffic. If your app started and then crashed, the reason is here.
Looking for one in the other is the most common way to conclude there is nothing to see. A crash on startup is in Runtime logs, not in the build output. A build that failed leaves Runtime logs empty, because nothing ever ran. Below both, a Deployment History section lists your recent deployments so you can see which attempt is which. What it does to your bill: nothing. Reading either log costs nothing and changes nothing about your app.

​
If Redeploy seems to do nothing

Pressing Redeploy while a deploy is already running produces no feedback at all. No message, no error, nothing moves on screen. The refusal is real, but the console does not show it to you, so the natural reaction is to press again. Open the Deployments tab instead and watch the deploy that is already running. When it finishes, Redeploy works normally again.

​
If a delete is refused

An app cannot be deleted while a deploy is running. The failure you get back says only that the delete did not work, with nothing to suggest that waiting would fix it, and it is the whole of the explanation you are given. It is a timing refusal and nothing more. Open the Deployments tab, wait for the running deploy to finish, then delete. Stop, Restart and Change plan are refused the same way while another change to the app is still in flight, and there the message does tell you to try again in a moment. Wait a few seconds and press the control again.

​
An app you have not deployed yet

A brand new app looks different from the one described above, and none of it is a fault. The first button reads Deploy rather than Redeploy, because there is nothing to redeploy yet. There are no logs: Deployment logs has no build to show and Runtime logs has no container to stream from. Deployment History is empty. Stop is absent, because an app that is not running cannot be stopped. All of that resolves itself the moment your first deploy runs.

​
When a message needs explaining

Every failure message PivoCloud can show you, what each one really means, and what to change, is on why did my deploy fail. Search that page for the exact sentence you were shown.