Knowledge Base · Infrastructure & deployment
The site you are editing is not always the site you are serving
The symptom
The repository contained the framework source and a build script. After a clean build the deployed page looked unchanged.
What was actually wrong
The web server's document root was a separate, older directory — the source tree and the served directory were different paths, and an older copy of the project existed under a similar name, which made the mismatch easy to miss. Configuration dumps and file timestamps were the only reliable evidence.
The fix
Establish which directory the server really uses (nginx -T is authoritative, plus the file's modification time), then define one deployment step: build in the source tree, copy the build output into the served directory while preserving the paths it also hosts, and confirm with a request to the live origin.
What we took away
Always verify which file is being served — a configuration dump plus the served bytes, not the directory you assume. Naming a directory after the project and another after an older project is how an afternoon disappears.