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Refreshing state in the Dagster+ UI

Preview feature

This feature is considered in a preview stage, and is under active development, and not considered ready for production use. You may encounter feature gaps, and the APIs may change. For more information, see the API lifecycle stages documentation.

A state-backed component that uses the VERSIONED_STATE_STORAGE strategy stores its state in a state storage backend and loads it at runtime. In Dagster+, you can refresh that state directly from the UI so the code location picks up the latest state without a full redeploy.

This is useful when the external system a component reflects has changed — for example, when models, tables, or reports have been added upstream — and you want the component's definitions to catch up without waiting for your next deployment. For refreshing state as part of a deployment or in an automated pipeline, see Managing state in CI/CD.

Prerequisites​

  • A Dagster+ deployment.
  • The Enable experimental component instance UI feature flag turned on, from User settings → Feature flags → Enable experimental component instance UI. The Refresh action is part of the component management UI, which is a preview feature.
  • A component that uses the VERSIONED_STATE_STORAGE state management strategy. See Configuring state-backed components.

Refresh a component's state​

  1. Navigate to the code location and open the Components tab.
  2. On the Instances sub-tab, find the component in the table.
  3. In the State column, select Refresh.

The State column shows how recently each component's state was refreshed. The Refresh action is available only for components that use VERSIONED_STATE_STORAGE; components whose state is fixed at deploy time don't show a Refresh action — update those by redeploying.

What happens during a refresh​

When you refresh, Dagster+ fetches the component's latest state from the source system. The refresh resolves in one of three ways:

  • Completed: the new state is fetched within a few seconds and the UI shows Refreshed component state.
  • Still running: if it takes longer, the UI shows Refreshing… and keeps checking for up to five minutes. If it hasn't finished by then, the UI tells you it didn't complete and to check the logs.
  • Failed: if the refresh fails — for example, because the source system is unavailable — the UI shows the error message.

Refreshing updates only the component's state; it doesn't deploy new code.