Building Golem Components

Building Golem components having an application manifest is straightforward.

Use the golem command line interface to run the build:


golem build

The result of the golem build command is a WebAssembly component file ready to be deployed to Golem. To deploy it, use the deploy command:


golem deploy

Redeployment options

By default, golem deploy uploads and activates the latest component versions but leaves existing agents untouched — they continue running the previous version with their current state. To control what happens to running agents after deployment, use one of the following mutually exclusive flags:

Flag	Behavior
`--reset`	Delete all agents and the environment (API deployments, retry policies, plugins, etc.), then deploy everything from scratch. This is the most destructive option, but the most useful during iterative development.
`--update-agents <MODE>`	Update agents in-place to the new component version. Use `auto` for automatic oplog-replay–based migration, or `manual` when you have implemented snapshot-based migration. Agent state is preserved.
`--redeploy-agents`	Delete every existing agent and recreate it with the same name, environment variables, and configuration, pointing to the latest component version. Agent state is lost.

When to use each option

--reset — Use when you want a completely clean slate, for example during iterative local development or in CI pipelines where you need deterministic, reproducible deployments.
--update-agents auto — Use in production or whenever you need to preserve agent state across a backward-compatible code change.
--update-agents manual — Use when you have a breaking change but have implemented a snapshot-based migration so state can be carried over.
--redeploy-agents — Use during development when agent state does not matter but you want to preserve the existing agent list and per-agent environment variables / configuration

For more details see the Redeploying Existing Agents and Updating Running Agents guides.