Hello Replit community,
I’m currently experiencing an urgent issue with my project deployment and I haven’t been able to get it resolved yet.
When I try to add my DATABASE_URL secret under Deployment, it does not get saved — even after multiple attempts. As a result, my website has been down for 5 days. I have a paid NEON database plan, so it’s not related to the database going idle, the endpoint is active and running.
I’ve already contacted Replit support, but since the problem remains unresolved and my project is still offline, I wanted to ask here in case anyone has encountered the same issue or knows of a workaround.
Any guidance or assistance would be greatly appreciated, this is quite critical for me.
Thank you very much for your time and support.
1 Like
Are you adding it and then hitting the deploy button? They are not saved if you don’t hit that button.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for your reply. I just want to clarify that I’ve already tried the usual steps — saving, removing, re-adding the secret, and redeploying. At first, I thought the issue might be with Neon, but the problem is actually that the DATABASE_URL is not being properly saved or retained under Deployment secrets.
Here’s what I’ve observed:
-
A few days ago, I couldn’t save the secret at all, as soon as I entered it and clicked save, the value reverted immediately to an old database URL.
-
Last night, it briefly appeared to save for a few seconds, which allowed me to deploy quickly, but then the site crashed with an internal error. When I checked again, the secret had reverted back to the older value.
It seems that an outdated DATABASE_URL keeps overwriting the one I enter. This behavior is consistent ( I am reaching one month of instability) and beyond what I can troubleshoot on my side.
Now my site has been completely offline for several days now.
1 Like
Deployment secrets conflict – development DATABASE_URL overriding production
If it helps anyone facing a similar issue: after 5 days of going in circles, I realized that my development DATABASE_URL under Deployment secrets was interfering with my production DATABASE_URL.
Instead of repeatedly re-adding or deleting the development entry, I left it in place under Deployment secrets and simply added a new field with the production database secret URL. After deploying with this setup, the application finally worked.
Avoid overlapping or duplicate secret names in Deployment, as they can override each other in unexpected ways.
I hope this solution holds, and that it might save others some time if they encounter the same problem.
1 Like
Glad you got there @storagetirana. And yeah, this is why I no longer use Replit’s DB solution. The combination with the agent is too opinionated.
I much prefer to have total control with my supabase DB (for auth and file storage too). As far as the Agent knows, it is an external tool and so must listen strictly to how I want it configured, not start trying to take control of various “special” secrets (e.g. DATABASE_URL).
The more I hear of experiences like yours, together with my own, the more I believe that Replit needs to be very carefuly of becoming the “every tool under one roof” AI dev provider.
Of course they will, just like all the other AI dev providers - because they are in a race to inherit the earth. But for every tool they embed, it creates a new set of spaghetti issues with all the other tools - the issues grow exponentially. Much better (IMHO) to do one thing well, and ensure it is good at connecting to best-of-breed 3rd party (and external!!) tools.
Sorry to rant on your thread, but you raised a really interesting issue that could become a can of worms if Replit aren’t careful 
1 Like