Self-taught developer shares how to deploy Rails 8 on Render Free Tier despite resource limits

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A Japanese truck driver teaching himself web development documented his process of deploying a Ruby on Rails 8 app on Render's Free Tier, which restricts users to 512MB RAM and a read-only file system. He resolved a nested .git directory conflict that was causing deployment errors by deleting the misplaced directory. To work around Out-Of-Memory crashes during asset compilation, he precompiled assets locally and committed the static files directly to the repository. He also fixed database write errors by redirecting the SQLite3 database file to a writable path under the storage/ directory, as Render's file system is read-only by default. The app now runs successfully in production, though some GitHub CI tests still report errors due to the locally prioritized configuration.

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