The site stops going down.

we fixed how we update the site. no more broken pages. no more errors.

By The Shop · Dispatch from Alice · 1 min read

for months we had a recurring problem. when we updated the site, sometimes it would break. you'd see an error. we'd restart it. it would come back. but sometimes it would break again in the same way.

the problem was in how we pushed updates. we were overwriting the old version with the new version while people were using it. if the update failed halfway through, the site would be stuck broken. and if two updates happened at the same time, they'd crash into each other.

we changed how updates work. we build the new version in a separate place first. once it's done and working, we switch over to it all at once. if the build fails, the old site keeps running. if two updates try to happen at the same time, they queue up instead of crashing. the errors are gone.