Skip to content

Deploying an image, when the Render service has no connected repo

Render always builds on Render — either from a connected GitHub repo, or by pulling a pre-built image from a container registry. It never accepts or uploads your local working tree, in either mode.

If your Render service is configured against a registry image rather than a repo:

  1. Build locally: docker build -f bot/Dockerfile -t ghcr.io/<you>/pr-review-engine:<tag> .
  2. Push it to the registry: docker push ghcr.io/<you>/pr-review-engine:<tag>
  3. In the Render dashboard, point the service at that image and tag (Settings).
  4. Run --sync-env (see Deploying and verifying) to push config and trigger a deploy against the new image.

How verification adapts

The render-service check reports whichever artifact is actually live — a git commit sha for a repo-connected service, or the image ref for an image-backed one — and only attempts the local-HEAD comparison when a commit is present. An image-backed deploy reports PASS with "no local comparison possible" rather than inventing a mismatch it has no way to check. See Deployment checks for the rest of the check list.

Next