Runbooks
One procedure per kind of failure, written in advance; in each incident concerned, the checklist is ticked in one gesture and keeps who did what, when.
Team plan and aboveUpdated on 17 September 2026
On this page
At three in the morning, nobody thinks well. The Runbooks page (Project → Operations → Runbooks) is for writing, on a quiet day, what will have to be done the day such a thing breaks — and for finding it again, as a checklist, inside the incident itself.
What PostShip does
A procedure, a trigger, steps
A procedure has a title, a trigger and steps — twelve at most, one per line. The trigger is the kind of check that opens the incident: a page that stops responding, the purchase journey, an API contract, the certificate, DNS or the domain, payment, a script that stops beating — or “any incident”. Up to twenty procedures per project.
Three templates to start with
“The site stops responding”, “Payment is broken”, “The certificate expires or has expired”: three procedures written for an online shop, created in one click, to adapt or delete. Each points to the pages that help decide — Regions, Third parties, Deployments, Domains and certificates.
The checklist in the incident
On an incident's page, under the acknowledgement, the procedures that concern it are shown with one box per step. Ticking records the time and the person; unticking erases. The trace stays with the incident — the post-mortem does not have to reconstruct it. A read-only member sees the checklist without being able to tick it.
Settings
On the page: the title, the trigger, the steps, “Create the procedure”. “Delete” removes the procedure; boxes already ticked in past incidents go with it. To change a procedure, delete and recreate it — the steps paste in one go.
What triggers an alert
Nothing new: procedures do not warn, they answer.
Limits and plans
| Free | Pro | Team | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Procedures per project | — | — | 20 | 20 |
| Steps per procedure | — | — | 12 | 12 |
| Checklist in incidents | — | — | Yes | Yes |
See plans.
Troubleshooting
The procedure does not show in the incident
Its trigger does not match the check that opened the incident: a “Certificate” procedure does not appear on a page returning 500. Set the trigger to “Any incident” if it should always be there.
Who ticked does not appear
The box carries the member's display name, then their full name, then the start of their address. A member who left the workspace leaves the date without a name.
Steps are truncated
A step is 240 characters at most; beyond that it is cut. A short step reads better in the middle of the night — put the detail in a page of your wiki and paste its address.