Design a hotfix path plan

A hotfix path is the answer to: production is broken, the fix must ship now, and main contains half-finished work that must not go with it.

The shape

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Figure 1 — Mermaid diagram

Branch from the released commit, not from main. That is the whole point: it isolates the fix from unreleased work.

Merge back. A hotfix that never returns to main will be overwritten by the next release — the bug reappears, having apparently been fixed. This is the most commonly tested failure.
Same pipeline, same gates. An emergency is when quality gates matter most. Reduce scope, not rigour.
Pre-approved break-glass. If approvals must be bypassed at 3am, decide who may do that and how it is audited beforehand. Approvals are configured by the resource owner, so this is their decision, not the on-call engineer's.
Keep the trail. Whatever is skipped should be recorded, so the follow-up is visible.

Primary sources

A hotfix path is the answer to: production is broken, the fix must ship now, and main contains half-finished work that must not go with it.

Loading Diagram...

Figure 1 — Mermaid diagram

Branch from the released commit, not from main. That is the whole point: it isolates the fix from unreleased work.

Merge back. A hotfix that never returns to main will be overwritten by the next release — the bug reappears, having apparently been fixed. This is the most commonly tested failure.
Same pipeline, same gates. An emergency is when quality gates matter most. Reduce scope, not rigour.
Pre-approved break-glass. If approvals must be bypassed at 3am, decide who may do that and how it is audited beforehand. Approvals are configured by the resource owner, so this is their decision, not the on-call engineer's.
Keep the trail. Whatever is skipped should be recorded, so the follow-up is visible.

Primary sources