Base44 Published App Not Reflecting Changes — Cache & Build Fix

Why your Base44 published app is not reflecting changes

Base44 published apps fail to reflect editor changes for four reasons in order of frequency: the build pipeline silently failed after Publish so the last successful artifact is still being served, the CDN in front of the app is still serving a cached HTML or JS bundle with a long max-age, the browser is holding a stale service worker or memory-cached bundle, or you have been editing a non-production workspace and the production workspace was never republished. Diagnose by comparing the response headers and HTML between preview and production, checking the build log for warnings or errors that did not block Publish, and verifying the workspace name and environment variables on each side. Fix the underlying cause rather than clicking Publish repeatedly.

You made changes in the Base44 editor. Maybe you updated a heading, fixed a bug, added a new section. Preview shows the change. You click Publish. The button confirms success. You open the production URL and the old version is still there.

You wait five minutes. You hard refresh. You try incognito. Still the old version. You click Publish again. Same result.

This is one of the more frustrating Base44 issues to debug because the failure mode is silent. Publish reports success, but the production deployment is still serving the previous build. The cause is almost always one of four things, and most users do not check the diagnostic signals that would tell them which one.

This guide walks through the four root causes, how to confirm which one you have, and how to fix it without resorting to the click-Publish-and-pray loop.

What causes Base44 published changes not to deploy

Four causes account for almost every instance of this problem. They are listed here in order of frequency based on patterns seen across user reports on the feedback board and community Discord.

Cause 1: Silent build failure. You clicked Publish. The build pipeline started. Something in your code — a missing import, a TypeScript error, a syntax mistake the agent introduced — broke the build partway through. The platform rolled back to the last successful artifact and the production URL kept serving the old version. The Publish button confirmed it received your request, but the build log shows a failed build with no obvious surface to the editor UI.

This is the single most common cause. The editor will sometimes show a small warning icon, but most users miss it.

Cause 2: CDN cache still serving the old artifact. The build succeeded and a new artifact deployed to the origin, but the CDN edge nodes between your browser and the origin are still serving cached responses with a long max-age. Default Base44 cache TTLs vary by asset type — HTML is usually short, but JS and CSS bundles often carry hour-plus max-age headers. If the build is hashed properly, this should not happen for the bundles themselves, but it does happen when the HTML that references the bundles is cached.

Cause 3: Browser-level cache or service worker. The build deployed, the CDN is serving fresh content, but your browser is using a cached HTML response, a cached JS bundle, or a registered service worker that intercepts requests and returns old content. This is browser-side, not platform-side, but it produces the same symptom.

Cause 4: Wrong workspace edited. Teams using Base44 often have multiple workspaces — dev, staging, production. Changes in dev do not propagate to prod. If you have been editing dev and clicking Publish in dev, you are deploying to a dev URL while expecting to see changes on the prod URL. This is increasingly common as teams grow beyond a single editor.

A fifth, less common cause: environment variable mismatch between preview and production. The build succeeds in both, but the production environment lacks a feature flag or API key that the change depends on, so the code path renders as if the change does not exist. This is especially common when a teammate adds a new env var locally, ships the code that depends on it, and forgets to add the same var to the production environment panel.

A sixth edge case worth knowing about: server-side data caching on integrated backends. If your Base44 app pulls from an external API or a built-in data table, the data layer can cache responses independently of the front-end build. The new UI deploys, but it still reads stale data. This is rare for purely visual changes but common when the change involves a schema update or a new query.

How to confirm which cause you have (reproduction)

Run these checks in order. Each one eliminates one of the four causes.

1. Open the Base44 editor. Confirm the change is saved (look for the saved indicator).
2. Note the workspace name in the top nav. Confirm it matches the production workspace.
3. Open the build log. Find the entry with the timestamp matching your most recent Publish. Note the status — success, failed, or in_progress. A failed build eliminates Causes 2-4 — you have Cause 1.
4. If the build succeeded, open the production URL in an incognito window. If the new version appears there but not in your normal browser, you have Cause 3.
5. If incognito also shows the old version, open DevTools → Network. Refresh the page. Click the document request. Look at Response Headers:
   • Age: 0 and x-cache: MISS → not a CDN cache hit, look further.
   • Age: 600 (or any high number) and x-cache: HIT → CDN is serving stale content (Cause 2).
   • Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600 on the HTML → long cache TTL is the underlying setting.
6. If the headers show fresh content but the page still looks old, view page source and search for a string unique to your change. If the source contains the new string but the rendered page does not, the JS bundle is stale or the data layer is cached.
7. If preview shows the change and production does not, even with all cache cleared, compare the environment variables between the two environments. A missing prod env var is Cause 5.

How to fix Base44 published app not reflecting changes

Fix for Cause 1: Failed build

Open the build log. Click into the most recent failed build. Read the error message — it usually names a file and a line number. Common errors:

ERROR: Module not found: Can't resolve './components/NewSection'
ERROR: Unexpected token, expected ","  at src/pages/Home.tsx:42
ERROR: Type error: Property 'foo' does not exist on type 'Bar'

Fix the underlying error. Save. Publish again. Watch the build log this time — do not assume success based on the Publish button alone. The build log is the source of truth.

If the editor's agent generated broken code, ask it to fix the specific error. Pasting the build log error message into the chat usually gets a targeted fix. Do not click Publish in a loop expecting a different result; each click triggers another failed build and clutters the log.

Fix for Cause 2: Stale CDN cache

Base44 does not currently expose a manual cache-purge control. Three workarounds:

Wait for TTL expiry. Check the Cache-Control: max-age=N value in the response headers. After N seconds, the edge node will fetch fresh content. Usually 5-60 minutes.

Cache-busting query string. Append a query parameter to the URL: https://yourapp.base44.app/?v=2026-05-24. CDNs treat this as a different cache key and fetch fresh content. Useful for testing whether the cache is the cause, less useful as a permanent fix.

Custom CDN with purge control. If you front Base44 with your own Cloudflare, Fastly, or Vercel edge, you can configure cache behavior and purge on demand. Sample Cloudflare Worker:

addEventListener("fetch", (event) => {
  event.respondWith(handle(event.request));
});

async function handle(request) {
  const url = new URL(request.url);
  const upstream = `https://your-base44-app.base44.app${url.pathname}${url.search}`;

  const response = await fetch(upstream, {
    cf: {
      // Short TTL for HTML so deploys propagate quickly.
      cacheTtl: 60,
      cacheEverything: true,
    },
  });

  // Override Cache-Control on HTML responses so the browser does not cache too long.
  const contentType = response.headers.get("content-type") ?? "";
  if (contentType.includes("text/html")) {
    const modified = new Response(response.body, response);
    modified.headers.set("Cache-Control", "public, max-age=0, must-revalidate");
    return modified;
  }
  return response;
}

This gives you a purge button in your Cloudflare dashboard and tighter control over the HTML TTL.

Fix for Cause 3: Browser cache or service worker

Hard refresh: Cmd-Shift-R (macOS) or Ctrl-Shift-F5 (Windows). This bypasses the browser HTTP cache but does not always bypass service workers.

For service workers: DevTools → Application → Service Workers → Unregister. Reload. The site will re-register on the next load if the code does so.

For aggressive browser caches: clear site data. DevTools → Application → Storage → Clear site data. This nukes localStorage, sessionStorage, cookies, and cached responses for the origin.

Tell users with the same complaint to do the same. Send them a hard-refresh shortcut. If many users see stale content after every deploy, your cache strategy is too aggressive — adjust the Cache-Control headers via a proxy as in the Cloudflare Worker example above.

Fix for Cause 4: Wrong workspace

Switch to the production workspace in the workspace selector. Re-apply the change there. Click Publish. Confirm in the build log that the production workspace build succeeded.

For teams: set up a clear naming convention — app-dev, app-prod — and document which one developers should edit. Permission-gate the production workspace so only one or two people can publish to it.

Fix for Cause 5: Environment variable mismatch

Open the env var panel for production. Compare against preview/dev. Add any missing variables. Re-deploy. Test.

For long-term hygiene, keep an env.example file in your repo that lists every variable name (no values). Run a check on deploy that flags any variable in env.example that is missing in the target environment.

Diagnostic: compare preview vs production HTML

The single most useful command for this problem is a diff of the HTML between preview and production.

curl -s https://preview.your-base44-app.base44.app > /tmp/preview.html
curl -s https://your-base44-app.base44.app > /tmp/prod.html
diff /tmp/preview.html /tmp/prod.html | head -100

Three possible outcomes:

• Identical or near-identical HTML. Build and CDN are aligned. The problem is browser cache (Cause 3) or env vars (Cause 5).
• Different HTML, different bundle hashes. The build deployed but production is serving a different artifact. Likely a CDN cache hit on production (Cause 2) or a wrong workspace (Cause 4).
• Different HTML, same bundle hash. Rare. Indicates a server-side data layer cache or an A/B test framework returning different content for the same bundle.

You can also pipe through grep for a specific string unique to your change to confirm whether the new content is in the production response body.

How long does the fix take?

Most causes resolve in under 20 minutes once diagnosed.

• Failed build (Cause 1): 5-15 minutes to read the build error, fix the underlying issue, and republish.
• CDN cache (Cause 2): 5 minutes for cache-busting workarounds, longer if you set up a custom CDN proxy (1-2 hours one-time).
• Browser cache (Cause 3): 2 minutes to hard-refresh or unregister a service worker.
• Wrong workspace (Cause 4): 5 minutes to switch workspaces and republish.
• Env vars (Cause 5): 5-10 minutes to compare environments and add the missing variable.

The time-consuming part is usually the diagnosis, not the fix. The four-cause framework above is designed to narrow down which fix you need in under 5 minutes of inspection.

DIY vs hire decision

DIY this if: You can read a build log and use browser DevTools. All five causes are diagnosable and fixable by a non-engineer with 30 minutes and the steps above. Most "Publish is broken" reports turn out to be Cause 1 (failed build) or Cause 4 (wrong workspace) and resolve immediately once identified.

Hire help if: The build log shows errors you cannot interpret, your team has a complex multi-workspace setup and you keep deploying to the wrong one, or you need a custom CDN proxy in front of Base44 to get cache-purge control. The proxy work is a 2-4 hour engagement and pays off if you deploy multiple times per day.

If the same change keeps failing to deploy after multiple attempts and the build log shows success each time, the issue is usually environmental (env vars, workspace, or external dependency) rather than caching. A second pair of eyes on the env config and workspace settings resolves it quickly.

Need this fixed before your next launch?

Our fix-sprint engagement diagnoses the deploy pipeline, identifies which of the four causes is blocking you, fixes the immediate issue, and installs a CDN proxy with cache-purge control if you need predictable deploys at scale. Typical engagement: 2-6 hours.

Start a fix-sprint engagement for deploy issues

Related problems

• Base44 deployment error: Publish failed — when Publish surfaces an explicit error rather than silently rolling back.
• Custom domain DNS stuck on pending — when the deploy is fine but DNS is not routing traffic to the new build.
• Editor hangs and crashes on large apps — when the editor stops saving reliably, which can cause changes to never reach the build pipeline.