500 Internal Server Error - Trouble finding what is causing the problem

Hello everyone! We have been part of the Sharetribe community for over a year now and it has been an amazing experience so far. We launched our marketplace with the self-hosted version on a Digitalocean $20/month droplet and have not had any major problems running everything. We have built a nice community and are growing rapidly. Our plans are to switch to Sharetribe Flex later this year so we can expand our community and build more a more comprehensive platform.

Unfortunately today I tried accessing our website and received a error message stating “500 Internal Server Error. If you are the administrator of this website, then please read this web application’s log file and/or the web server’s log file to find out what went wrong”.

We have never had this happen before and I’m having trouble finding out what is causing the problem. My colleague and I just recently started learning how to code, so we don’t have a lot of expereince with programming. We would appreciate any help so we can have our website running again. Thank you in advance!

Hey @John24!

Good to hear about your progress so far and your plans for the future! Sounds exciting.

Sorry to learn about the current situation. This is quite challenging without more information, though. That could be about anything…

Can you tell us a bit more? Are you able to access your server logs, or a Rails console, to get more information there?

If you’re not familiar with this, you may have to hire someone to help you check this out and investigate.

Keep us posted!