Cover image for Deploying Rails 8 on Render Free Tier: Bypassing the 512MB RAM and Read-Only Storage Limits

tosane932

1. Introduction

Hello from Japan! 🇯🇵

I am an active truck driver in Japan self-studying Python, leveraging my logistics domain knowledge to become a Web Engineer.

(English is my second language, but I'm excited to share my journey with developers around the world!)

I started my self-study journey on May 12, 2026. In this article, I summarize the process of deploying Ruby on Rails 8 to a PaaS (Render Free Tier) and how I tackled the strict resource constraints I ran into.

2. Environment

  • Development: Lenovo G580 (Lubuntu 24.04 LTS / 16GB RAM / Upgraded SSD)
  • Production: Render (Free Tier: 512MB RAM)
  • Testing Device: Xiaomi 15T

3. Challenges & Solutions

① Git Repository Structure Inconsistency

  • Issue: An unnecessary .git directory existed inside a subdirectory, causing errors during deployment.
  • Solution: Deleted the nested .git directory to restore repository hierarchy integrity.

② Build Failure via Render Free Tier RAM Limit (512MB)

  • Issue: Executing asset compilation on Render triggered Out-Of-Memory (OOM) crashes, forcibly killing the build process.
  • Solution: Precompiled assets locally and committed the static files to the repository, significantly reducing memory usage on the production build server.

③ SQLite3 Write Permission Error

  • Issue: Encountered database write permission errors during CRUD operations in production. Render's file system is read-only by default, except for designated directories (such as storage/).
  • Solution: Updated config/database.yml to direct the SQLite3 database file to a path with write permissions (e.g., under storage/).

4. Conclusion

By applying these workarounds, I successfully verified the deployment and operation of a Rails 8 application on Render's Free Tier.

(Please note: Although production runtime works properly, because the setup prioritizes local configurations, some automated CI tests on GitHub currently report errors.)