Elixir/Phoenix Docs are Wrong (and how are environment changes tested by Render?)

Right now the docs on https://render.com/docs/deploy-phoenix do not work. As discussed in the Slack chat, you have to manually switch the node-sass dependency as a workaround for recent changes in the Render node environment.

Would love to see this updated, if nothing else to learn if this is the “official” way to run Elixir on Render.

This makes me wonder - how are environment upgrades like this tested or announced by the Render team? It is really frustrating to have my deployment break because of an unannounced upgrade. While I generally like Render more than Heroku, this is something that Heroku would never do.

Sorry about the trouble @sparker. This was a one-time change that passed through the cracks in our automated testing. Going forward, environment upgrades that aren’t critical security fixes will be entirely optional. We will also add more tests to catch these issues before they make it to production.

We will update our guide for existing Phoenix projects. It still works for new projects because the latest version of phx.new installs a version of node-sass that is compatible with Node 14:

    "node-sass": "^4.13.1",

This installs node-sass version 4.14.1 which added support for Node 14 in April 2020.