The Silent Test Database That Blocks Your Lovable Publish

You've been building, and you're ready to ship. You made your changes, the preview looks exactly right, you hit publish... and it just won't go. You try again. You wait. You retry a few more times, maybe let the AI take a couple of passes at "fixing" it and watch your credits drain. And still nothing, the error (if you even get one) points at nothing useful.

It's one of the most frustrating walls in Lovable, because everything looks fine except the one thing you need. Before you lose another week to it: check for a leftover test database.

The symptom

Publishing or updating just fails. Sometimes you get a generic "publishing failed." Sometimes a build or container error like TRANSIENT_INFRA or executor.GetLogs ... connection refused. Nothing in the message says "it's the database."

That's exactly why this one steals weeks from people. You go hunting through your code, your fonts, your env vars, and the real cause is sitting somewhere you never think to look.

What's actually happening

A while back, Lovable had a test/live beta in Labs. It gave your project two databases: one for testing, one for production. That feature is gone now, removed from Labs.

But if you turned it on before it was deprecated, the leftover "test" database can still be there, attached to your project. And that second database tangles your environment. Your env vars resolve to one database, Lovable Cloud points at another, and the build can't reconcile the two. So it fails, quietly, with no error that names the real cause.

The fix (two minutes)

1. Open Lovable Cloud and go to the database section.
2. Look for a "test" database sitting alongside your live one.
3. If it's there, delete the test database.
4. Republish.

Publishing usually works immediately after. I've watched this unblock people who were stuck for two weeks.

How to know if this is you

It's worth checking if:

• You ever enabled the test/live beta, even months ago.
• Your publish has been failing for days, not minutes.
• The preview works fine but the published site won't update.

If you never touched that beta, this probably isn't your issue, and that's useful to know too. It tells you to look elsewhere.

When it's NOT this

If you never used test/live and you're seeing TRANSIENT_INFRA with connection refused, that's a different animal. That error means the build executor itself can't be reached, which is platform-side, not your code.

For that one: retry a couple times spaced out, since a genuine transient blip clears on a fresh build container. If it stays stuck for a day or more, email support@lovable.dev with your project id and the exact error line so they can reset your build state. Deleting the test db is the thing you can fix yourself. This one needs them.

Quick reference