Debugging a Legacy CRA + Django Deployment Pipeline: A DevOps Postmortem

Short summary

A detailed DevOps postmortem of containerizing a legacy Create React App frontend and Django backend. Key issues included a Dockerfile copy-pasted from a Next.js project, Yarn/npm command confusion, Node version mismatches across build stages causing silent ABI errors, and OpenSSL 3 incompatibility with Webpack 4. The author argues against standardizing on EOL Node 16 and instead fixing application dependency debt.

• •Inherited Dockerfile was copy-pasted from a Next.js project and incompatible with CRA's static build output
• •Node version mismatches across multi-stage Docker builds caused silent ABI errors that passed CI but failed in production
• •OpenSSL 3 and strict exports enforcement in Node 17+ broke legacy Webpack 4 and postcss dependencies

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