Could of minor feedback reports / feature requests from a new user.
On heroku I’m used to being able to pg:reset which means I don’t need to worry about keeping migrations working up and down in early development. I couldn’t see an equivalent through the render web interface and I ended up deleting and recreating a database.
That required updating a DATABASE_URL env var which caused my web service to start throwing connection errors. I then didn’t see an obvious way to restart the process / bump the app to connect to the new db. Perhaps suspend and resume is the solution but I didn’t see an immediate shutdown on suspend and when I tried to trigger a deploy it seemed to get stuck.
This may be transient stuff / just my sequence of events but I was staring at it thinking “crikey, imagine this was happening in production” so thought I’d share in case useful use feedback.
Ideally I’d like:
clearer feedback on what happens after setting an env var – does my service restart?
control over bumping / stopping / starting / restarting services
a button to reset the db easily whilst I’m still in early dev
First off, thanks for your feedback! It’s really helpful to us to have this breakdown of your experience so we can continue to improve our UX.
For future cases when you want to redeploy your service, I recommend using the Manual Deploy button, which is on the right side of the screen near the top of your service’s page.
For the database reset command, I recommend that you leave a feedback request here, and you’ll be updated when there’s any news: Feature Requests | Render
Your service does redeploy when you set or change an environment variable. I see your point on this being unclear, so I’ll be making note of that so we can make that more transparent in the future.
I’m not positive why your service was experiencing connection issues when you updated the DATABASE_URL, though. That definitely should have restarted the service and caused it to use the new value. If you experience any issues like this again in the future, please let us know.
Your service does redeploy when you set or change an environment variable
Are you sure about that? I just changed an environment variable on my web service, and nothing happened, I can’t see any auto redeploy from the logs.
What we need to do after changing and env var is not clear. Plus, I think an env var modification should NOT lead to a redeploy, because the build is supposed to stay the same. It should lead to a restart of existing instances. Right?
If you have auto deploy for the service turned off, then updating an environment variable would not trigger a new deploy. You’d have to trigger a manual deployment of the service for it to take effect.