Deployment Day

“Deployment is painful” - Anurag Sharma

I started deployment on Render as I was already familiar with the process and their Free Tier is pretty generous, especially if I am not expecting much traffic. :/

I deployed the backend and then tested with my localhost frontend if the requests are reaching the backend successfully.

Then I moved on to deploying the frontend and the things were working fine (spoiler: they were not) I tested with chess.com and leetcode and the responses were fine.

Until…

So coming to the next day, I was just playing around again with it and I logged in with github. And it was completely broken.

• I found there was a hardcoded localhost POST request in the backend. I am never using localhost URLs during developemnt ever again, only using ENV files form now on.

More problems:

An issue arose because react-router-dom uses client-side routing, creating URLs that don’t exist on the server. Vite handles this locally but production environments throw 404 errors for unknown routes.

• Solution was to configure Render to use a Rewrite Rule. This tricks the server into sending index.html for every request. Once index.html loads, React spins up, reads the URL, and loads the correct page.

With this, I am closing this project and moving on to working on other projects. This was a fun experience and taught me a lot of stuff, both technical and conventions to follow. I have a few ideas that I might add in the future like using multimodal if the request to one model fails due to GeminiAPI RPD limits.

Any thoughts, feedback or suggestions? Mail me.

Good-bye