u/Fit-Jello-4828

I have been learning to code for about a yearn now (as a challenge to myself), and last week I deployed my first project that I built from scratch (so a little proud moment). It was a lot  harder than I had expected and took most of my weekends. 

What I found tripped me up was:

• Environment variables. App worked perfectly locally, in production it had no idea any of my env vars existed, and took about 45 minutes to find a naming mismatch.
• Localhost in my database URL. In production, localhost resolves to nothing useful.
• Build command vs start command. These are different things, and I had them in the wrong fields.
• Hardcoded port. Production environments assign ports dynamically.

What actually helped me:

• Using a platform that abstracts server infrastructure so I could focus on how my app behaves in production without also learning DevOps
• Reading the build logs instead of guessing and redeploying
• Writing detailed logs in my backend from the start

What helped you when you were first getting into deployment?