skytells status

Overview

skytells status returns a summary of an app's current runtime state — whether it is running, stopped, or in an intermediate state such as deploying or restarting. It also reports the active deployment version and basic health check results.

Use it to quickly validate that a deployment succeeded, or to check whether an app is healthy before routing traffic to it.

Syntax

skytells status [<app>] [--json]

Arguments

Argument	Description
`app`	Optional. App ID to check (begins with `app_`). If omitted, returns status for all apps in the linked project.

Flags

Flag	Description
`--json`	Output as JSON.

Examples

# Status of all apps in the linked project
skytells status

# Status of a specific app
skytells status app_abc123

# JSON — parse status in a script
skytells status app_abc123 --json

# Check if app is running before deploying
STATUS=$(skytells status app_abc123 --json | jq -r '.status')
if [[ "$STATUS" != "running" ]]; then
  echo "App is not running, skipping deploy"
  exit 1
fi

Example output:

App: api-service (app_abc123)
  Status:     running
  Version:    dep_abc001
  Health:     healthy
  Replicas:   2/2
  Updated:    2026-03-18 14:23 UTC

App status values

Status	Description
`running`	App is healthy and serving traffic
`starting`	App is in the process of starting up
`stopping`	App is draining traffic and shutting down
`stopped`	App has been manually stopped
`deploying`	A new deployment is in progress
`restarting`	App is restarting
`error`	App encountered a fatal error and is not serving requests

In CI/CD

Poll for a healthy state after a deployment:

#!/bin/bash
APP_ID="app_abc123"
MAX_RETRIES=12
INTERVAL=10

for i in $(seq 1 $MAX_RETRIES); do
  STATUS=$(skytells status "$APP_ID" --json | jq -r '.status')
  echo "[$i/$MAX_RETRIES] Status: $STATUS"
  if [[ "$STATUS" == "running" ]]; then
    echo "App is healthy!"
    exit 0
  fi
  sleep $INTERVAL
done

echo "App did not reach 'running' status in time"
exit 1

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