Question

Health check fails on app platform, cannot get logs

Posted on May 11, 2025
App Platform
Asked by dmitry.vasil

App Platform experience feels low-quality. Here is the list of issues.

I created an app on App Platform. I probably provided invalid creds for database, and the app fails to start. How can I get logs? doctl apps logs gives me Error: error reading from websocket: websocket: close 1011 (internal server error) The logs in admin console are empty

Then, it displays me an URL to my app (inside the HTTP Routes section) https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps/null/ Probably some js programmer have not checked for null and just interpolated null as a string

Then, I pressed ‘Connect a database’ button twice, and I have the same database added twice for the same app, and there is no way to remove the second copy. When I tried to remove it from yaml, it refuses to save yaml

How does ‘Connect a database’ is intended to work? As far as I can see, it inject a DATABASE_URL env var. Does it really help? My app does not recognize this env var, so it does not help me at all.

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• May 12, 2025

Hey Dmitry,

Thanks for sharing the details. A couple of things to keep in mind, if your app tries to connect to the database during the build phase, and your database uses trusted sources for connections, you should avoid DB connections during build time.

Regarding the logs, if the app crashes immediately, you won’t see any logs in the UI or via doctl. One workaround is to set a temporary run_command: sleep 3600 in your App Spec. That way the container stays alive long enough for you to inspect it.

The Connect a database button injects a DATABASE_URL environment variable, but your app needs to explicitly read that variable. If your framework doesn’t support that out of the box, you’ll need to wire it up manually.

Lastly, yeah, the duplicate database issue can be annoying. If the UI doesn’t let you remove the second one and YAML editing fails, your best bet is to redeploy clean or contact support directly at https://do.co/support.

- Bobby