MILKY

what a day man . 😩 I started working on this NASA APOD project thinking it’s going to be a simple quick-finish thing, but man… deployment and GitHub Actions decided to test my entire patience today.Let me be straight here: my time tracker shows only 27 minutes, but that is complete scam. I sat straight for almost 7 hours today. Spent a good 4 solid hours just fighting with GitHub, fixing deploying failures, repository bot permissions, and 404 errors. WakaTime only counts when you’re typing inside VS Code, but it has no idea how much brain cells I lost reading terminal errors and StackOverflow.Here is how the whole journey went down:The Building Part: First, I set up the Vite project and hooked it up with NASA’s official APOD API using environment variables (VITE_NASA_API_KEY). The local code was working fine, fetching gorgeous space pictures like a charm.The Vite Config Drama: When I pushed my deploy.yml workflow, the build immediately crashed saying config must export or return an object. Had to fix the vite.config.js and set the proper base path so GitHub Pages wouldn’t break the asset links.The 403 Permission Wall: Then came the worst part—GitHub Actions kept throwing a Permission Denied error for the github-actions[bot]. The bot literally didn’t have permission to write to my own repo! I had to dig into GitHub settings, go to Actions -> General, and switch the workflow permissions from read-only to read/write.The 404 Waiting Game: After finally getting that green tick, I opened the live URL and… 404 error. My heart skipped a beat lol. Turns out GitHub Pages just takes a minute or two to wake up and serve the files. After a quick refresh, boom—the NASA space picture loaded successfully!Total time actually spent: ~7 hours (even if the tracker says 27 mins because of all the debugging outside the editor).Repo: https://github.com/tharunkumarCYSEC/nasa-apod-pulse
Live Site: https://tharunkumarCYSEC.github.io/nasa-apod-pulse/