It Worked on Local..

It was supposed to be simple.

Just a quick deploy. Nothing fancy.

I had my personal admin dashboard haryc_ Admin System running perfectly on localhost. Books and blogs? Handled. CRUD? Smooth. Uploads? Clean. Styling? On point.

So I pushed it to production.

Refreshed the page.

And then, everything broke.

Like, not “small glitch” broke.

I mean meltdown.

Image uploads failed, routes went missing, validation died on me, and Cloudinary acted like we’d never met. Even the logout button gave me attitude.

It felt like my clean, well-behaved project ran off the moment it saw the real world.

I tried the usual clear config cache, triple-check the .env, re-read the docs like holy scripture.

Nothing worked.

Localhost had spoiled me. Production? It humbled me.

And so began my two-night debugging spiral.

Just me, a monitor full of error logs, and the quiet hum of despair.

I wasn’t building anything new. I was just trying to bring back what had once worked. It was like doing surgery on something I’d already declared healthy.

But eventually, slowly, things started working again.

The uploads were back.

The buttons behaved.

The system breathed.

And then I thought why stop here?

Originally, the admin panel only handled books and blog posts. But after surviving this mess, I figured, “Let’s level up.” So I built a Projects module now I could add, update, and showcase my portfolio projects directly from the dashboard. Images, descriptions, types, years all handled beautifully.

So yeah.

What started as a five-minute deploy turned into a weekend of chaos and a system upgrade.

Kinda like fixing a leaky faucet and ending up renovating the kitchen.

But now?

The admin panel is stable, online, and running better than ever.

I can manage all my content from anywhere.

And most importantly: I’m no longer afraid to hit deploy.

If you’re a dev and this sounds familiar you’re not alone.

Sometimes the stuff that breaks us a little, ends up making our work that much better.