What happened
The Choco web client — the public-facing documentation platform at cho.co — was stuck in a broken deployment state. The full UI had been built (21 pages, factory tour, document editor, authentication flow) but was never successfully deployed to production. We diagnosed the issue, fixed it, and the site is now live athttps://choco.devarno.cloud.
What was wrong
The Vercel hosting project was misconfigured. The web application lives in aweb/ subdirectory of the repository, but the project was telling Vercel to look at the repository root. Vercel couldn’t find anything to build, so every deployment failed instantly — zero seconds of build time. The error was silent enough that it wasn’t obvious from the GitHub status checks alone.
A secondary issue: the code was sitting on a working branch with no main branch created. Vercel was configured to deploy from main, so even when builds worked, they went to “preview” rather than “production.”
What we did
- Fixed the Vercel project configuration to point at the correct subdirectory
- Cleaned up a configuration file that was conflicting with the project settings
- Created the
mainbranch and set it as the default - Triggered a production deployment — built and live in under a minute
Business impact
Before: The choco.devarno.cloud URL returned nothing useful. The web product existed only as code in a repository branch. After: A fully navigable web application is live in production. 21 pages including the factory floor plan, document views, search, dashboard, and authentication scaffolding. Visitors can browse the full UI structure. No backend data is connected yet — that’s the next phase.Platform assessment
We audited all 47 repositories in the Choco GitHub organization. Key finding: the web client and a Go service are the only repos with shipped code. The remaining ~25 active repos have architecture documents, issue tracking, and CI configuration, but empty codebases. The platform is heavily planned but lightly built. The path to a functioning product has clear tiers:| Milestone | Effort | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| Live static UI | Done | Demonstrable product, shareable URL |
| Authentication | Hours | User sign-up/sign-in (add one environment variable) |
| First API endpoint | Days | Live document data on the site |
| Full integration | Weeks | Golden Tickets, verification, real-time features |
Action items
- Immediate: Share
https://choco.devarno.cloudas the current state of the product - Next: Configure Clerk authentication keys in Vercel to activate sign-in
- Planned: Prioritize BUNDLE-A (API contracts + database schema) to connect live data to the UI
- Watch: 8 Dependabot vulnerabilities flagged on the repo (2 high, 6 moderate) — should be addressed before any public launch