Developer shares lessons from failed Django deployment on Render despite successful build
A developer deployed a Django application to Render, only to encounter persistent 500 and 400 Internal Server Errors despite the platform reporting the service as live. The root cause was that the frontend's production build directory, expected at frontend/dist/, was never generated during deployment, as the build step had not been properly configured. This highlighted a key distinction: a repository containing source files does not automatically produce compiled build output unless the deployment pipeline explicitly runs the build process. The developer traced the issue through Render's logs, which showed Gunicorn running correctly while individual requests failed, underscoring that a live deployment status does not guarantee all application components are functioning. The experience revealed that multi-step deployments — covering dependency installation, frontend builds, and backend setup — must each be accounted for, especially since local environments can mask missing production steps.
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