I’m running into a strange problem with my application. When I run my code locally on my computer, everything works fine and my JSON files get updated as expected. But when I deploy the same code to a cloud platform, the JSON files don’t seem to get modified at all.
I’m using a Node.js application with the filesystem module to write data to JSON files. My setup includes deploying to a cloud service and storing my source code in a git repository. I think this might be related to how file systems work in hosted environments, but I’m not sure how to fix it.
Here’s a simple example of what I’m trying to do:
const fileSystem = require('fs');
if (someCondition) {
const userData = {"username": "alice", "status": "active"};
fileSystem.writeFileSync('./data.json', JSON.stringify(userData), {flag: 'w'});
// This works locally but fails on cloud hosting
}
The file writing operation completes without errors, but the changes never seem to stick when running in the cloud environment. Has anyone dealt with this kind of issue before?
Yeah, this happens all the time with containerized apps. Cloud platforms usually make the filesystem read-only or temporary, so anything you write gets wiped when the container restarts or scales. I hit this same issue with a Node.js app that was saving user preferences to JSON files. What you do next depends on what you need - for simple key-value stuff, try environment variables or SQLite with persistent volumes. For complex data, go with PostgreSQL or MongoDB. You could also skip the filesystem entirely and use cloud storage APIs directly in your code. Bottom line: cloud environments are stateless by design, so your persistent data has to live somewhere outside the container.
totally get it! cloud hosting can be weird. many platforms use ephemeral storage, so any file changes get wiped on restart. moving ur data to a db or services like AWS S3 might be the way to go - it keeps everything intact, even when u restart stuff.
Yeah, this trips up a lot of people with cloud deployments. Most cloud platforms treat container filesystems as temporary - your writes look like they work, but everything disappears when the container restarts or redeploys. Been there myself when my logging system kept losing data.
The writes don’t error out because they’re technically working in the container’s temp space. Problem is, that space gets nuked and rebuilt constantly.
You’ve got to think stateless now. Use Redis for caching or a real database for anything you need to keep. If you absolutely must have file storage, look into persistent volumes - though that makes scaling messier and isn’t always an option depending on your host.