Mastering Vellum Deployment – Release Tags Explained — Vellum

Introduction to Deployment Release Tags

As you start having many versions of a Prompt or Workflow, being able to manage these deployment releases becomes an important consideration.

In Vellum, you have multiple ways to manage releases so you can easily promote prompt / workflow changes from your development or staging environments into production with as much flexibility or control as required by your team.

Let’s take a look at some of the different release strategies in Vellum!

TL;DR Watch a Video Walkthrough Instead

This page highlights Prompt Deployments but the same holds true for managing your Workflow Deployment releases

Three Ways to Release Prompts or Workflows

1. Don’t Specify a Release Tag and Always Use Latest

Every time you create a new Prompt or Workflow Deployment or update an existing one, Vellum will automatically assign it as latest.

In this approach, you always point to the latest prompt or workflow available for a given Deployment by making your Vellum API requests without providing a specific Release Tag.

This method simplifies your deployment process by automatically incorporating any changes that you deploy from your Prompt or Workflow Sandbox.

2. Use Custom Release Tags

For more flexibility, Vellum lets you define Custom Release Tags. Custom Release Tags are floating tags that you define and can be moved by authorized users directly within the Vellum app.

You can assign multiple Custom Release Tags to a single Prompt or Workflow Deployment, providing flexibility to granularly assign and update versions across different environments.

For example, you can assign Custom Release Tags to point to a version of your prompt in both your “Production” and “Staging” environments.

This method offers you the ability to manage your releases according to your own specific workflow and versioning requirements.

Note that Custom Release Tags follow a specific format: less than or equal to 150 characters, begin and end with a Regex word character (i.e., letter, number, or underscore), contain only word characters, dashes or dots, and do not contain more than one dot in a row

3. Use Static Release Tags

Every time you create a new Deployment or update an existing one, Vellum creates a unique Static Release Tag tied to that version.

When using Static Release Tags to manage your releases, you can control version increments through code to ensure a structured and controlled release process.

This method is ideal if your organization prioritizes strict version management and you want to avoid accidental updates or changes to prompts.

Creating a Custom Release Tag

Release tags can be created:

Within the Create New or Update Existing tabs of the Deploy Prompt modal in a Prompt Sandbox or Deploy Workflow modal in a Workflow Sandbox
By opening the Assign Release Tags modal from the Releases tab of the Deployment Details page

Updating a Custom Release Tag

Release tags can be updated:

Within the Update Existing tab of the Deploy Prompt modal in a Prompt Sandbox or Deploy Workflow modal in a Workflow Sandbox
By opening the Assign Release Tags modal from the Releases tab of the Deployment Details page

Pinning to a Release Tag in Code

Both the Vellum execute_prompt and execute_workflow API’s accept an optional release_tag parameter to pin your request to a specific release tag. When release tags are updated via the Vellum app to point to new versions of a prompt or workflow, these changes will automatically reflect in these requests.

If no release_tag parameter is provided, the request will default to the latest version of that Deployment.

More details on how to do this: Vellum API Docs

Example Request

curl -X POST \
--url "https://predict.vellum.ai/v1/execute-prompt" \
--header "Content-Type: application/json" \
--header "X_API_KEY: $VELLUM_API_KEY" \
--header "Accept: application/json" \
--data '
{
  "inputs": [
    {
      "type": "STRING",
      "name": "string",
      "value": "string"
    }
  ],
  “release_tag”: “staging”
}
  '