We don’t support selective deployments based on content with the deploy_on_push functionality.

You could set deploy_on_push=false for the given component and manually trigger a deployment when you have updates you want to push out.

The only other thing I can think of is having a custom branch that you only update when you want the backend re-deployed.

Example:

github:
  repo: ...
  branch: digitalocean-backend-branch
  deploy_on_push: true

Let me know if you have any other questions!