How a 295-character database field crashed an entire static site build
Russian apartment listings site podbor-minuta.ru experienced a full static build failure when a scraped property record contained a 295-character sentence in a field meant to store a neighbourhood name. The page generator used this oversized value to construct a URL path, and the static site builder (Vike) attempted to create a corresponding directory on disk, exceeding the 255-byte filesystem limit for folder names. The bug went undetected for some time because Docker layer caching skipped the affected build step and local builds rarely fetched the corrupted record due to API timeouts, making it visible only in clean CI runs. Developers fixed the issue by adding a segment-length guard in the URL generator — rejecting any path segment over 120 characters — and by filtering out description-like values at the database query level. The incident highlighted that any uncontrolled external data can eventually become a filesystem path, and a single bad record should never be allowed to bring down an entire build.
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