Yesterday I found out the hard way that the neighborhood POI frontend did no longer work, and must have been broken for quite a while already.
Why didn’t I spot this in testing? Well …
- The problem was a typo in the OCitysMap renderer backend code, not in the frontend
- I tested the change back then locally
- But due to another typo in the test setup the local config for the POI frontend was copied to the wrong folder, and so not actually used
- So the frontend fell back to default settings for the rendering host, and that happened to be the public, not the local server
- Meaning that when testing the change I actually tested the frontend, which didn’t really change, against the not yet changed public render backend
- As test results looked good I pushed the changes, pulled them on the public server, but didn’t test there once more
- So the typo in the renderer went unnoticed as I actually didn’t test the local instance of that, and after the push/pull the public instance was broken, too 🙁
Renderer code and local test setup are fixed now, so something like this should hopefully not happen again.
Now I need to work on making the alternative frontend send email notifications about rendering errors to me, like the main frontend already does, so that a failure like this can’t go unnoticed for this long …