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When your app works in a dev session, deploy it to create long-running endpoints:
The command finds every app in the current directory, builds an artifact for each one, uploads it, and creates or updates the endpoints in the target environment. When it finishes, it prints a link to each endpoint. To deploy a different directory, pass it as an argument: rp flash deploy path/to/project.

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Options

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What goes into a build

Each build artifact contains:
  • Your project’s source files, filtered by the ignore rules.
  • Your dependencies, collected from the project’s requirements.txt and every resource’s dependencies list, and installed for Linux x86_64 workers.
  • A manifest describing every resource and its configuration.
You don’t build container images. Resources run on Runpod’s runtime images, which unpack the artifact and run your code. On the built-in GPU images, torch, torchvision, torchaudio, and triton are already installed, so they’re left out of the artifact automatically. If you use a custom image, every dependency is included unless you exclude it.

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Size limit

The artifact can be up to 1,500 MB. If it’s larger, the build fails. To shrink it, exclude large packages that your worker image already provides with --exclude, or leave out project files with .runpodignore.

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Ignore rules

The SDK uses Git-style ignore patterns to decide which project files go into the artifact. It applies them in this order, with later rules taking precedence:
  1. Default exclusions for virtual environments (.venv/, venv/, env/), caches (__pycache__/, *.pyc, .pytest_cache/, .mypy_cache/, .ruff_cache/), node_modules/, .DS_Store, *.tar.gz archives, and tests (tests/, test/, test_*.py, *_test.py).
  2. Your project’s .gitignore files. A .gitignore in a subdirectory overrides its parents for that subtree. Global and parent-directory Git ignores aren’t read.
  3. A .runpodignore file at the project root.
To include a file that an earlier rule excludes, add a negation pattern such as !data/sample.csv. If a parent directory is excluded, re-include the directory before its files. Symlinks are never included.

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Files that are always excluded

These paths are left out of every artifact, and negation patterns can’t re-include them:
  • .env files and variants such as .env.local and prod.env.
  • Keys and certificates: *.pem, *.key, and SSH private keys such as id_rsa and id_ed25519.
  • Credential directories and files: .ssh, .aws, .azure, .kube, .docker/config.json, .netrc, .npmrc, .pypirc, .git-credentials, .boto, and service-account*.json.
  • Internal paths: .git, .runpod, .flash, and the root env/ directory.
These safeguards match file names. They don’t scan file contents for secrets. Review a --build-only artifact before deploying, and pass credentials to workers with env and runpod.Secret.

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Call deployed resources

From another codebase, use runpod.Queue and runpod.Api to call resources in a deployed app by name:
Both target the default environment unless you pass env=. You can also call a deployed queue endpoint by ID with the endpoint client, or send HTTP requests to it directly. See Send API requests.

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Update and remove a deployment

To deploy new code, run rp flash deploy again with the same environment. To remove an environment’s endpoints, run:
See Apps and environments.

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Next steps

Last modified on October 15, 2026