## The Invisible Bug That Broke My React Deployment (and What It Taught Me)

I thought deploying a React app would be the easiest part of the project—until my production build went live and… a blank screen appeared. No errors in the browser. No crashes in the console. Just silence. Locally, everything worked perfectly. npm start was fine. But once deployed to GitHub Pages/Vercel, the app simply refused to render. That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t React—it was the deployment assumptions I had made. After hours of debugging, I found the culprit hiding in plain sight: incorrect routing configuration and missing homepage setup in package.json . React Router was trying to handle routes as if it was running on a server, but static hosting doesn’t work that way by default. // Fix for React Router on static hosting < BrowserRouter basename = { process . env . PUBLIC_URL } > And in package.json : "homepage" : "https://your-username.github.io/repo-name" That tiny line fixed everything. Lesson learned: Deployment isn’t just “uploading code”—it’s understanding the