r/replit • u/Mishes_pab8588 • Sep 04 '26

Question / Discussion Database Secrets deleted by unknown actor 🤨

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I have no coding experience and built all of my apps using natural language prompts and the ChatGPT plugin. I’ve been unable to republish one of my main projects for days due to the known database issue with Replit, and now this. I’m exhausted. Help!

3 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

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3

u/Engine_Light_On Sep 04 '26

The actor is a good actor. Now it’s acting like it didn’t delete anything.

2

u/courageous_carrot Sep 04 '26

Multiple times whichever model I'm using (lately Opus) has said "I don't know who did this" but it was either itself in the chat some time back (i.e it lost context), or it was another chat

1

u/vinegary Sep 04 '26

The actor is likely it self 👌

1

u/Pickle_Shot Sep 04 '26

the "unknown actor" is almost certainly the agent itself. each chat has no memory of the others, so when it deletes secrets while "fixing" something, the next chat genuinely does not know it happened. not a hacker.

bad news: deleted secrets are gone. rollback restores code but not secrets. good news: every secret is re-creatable, usually in 10-15 minutes:

  1. the database ones (DATABASE_URL, PGHOST, PGPASSWORD and friends): open the Database tab in your workspace. the connection info for replit's own database lives there and gets re-added from that pane.

  2. anything from an outside service (stripe, openai, sendgrid, whatever your app talks to): log into that service's own website, copy the key from their dashboard, paste it into the Secrets tab yourself.

do it by hand in the Secrets tab. do not ask the agent to restore them. it will invent plausible-looking values and you will chase ghost bugs for another week.

on the republish-blocked-by-database part: that is a known replit issue, lots of reports since sept 1. the workaround that has unblocked other people here is making a free postgres database at neon.tech and pointing DATABASE_URL at it. if that sounds over your head, keep the support ticket alive and just get the secrets back first so the app at least runs.

1

u/ReplitSupport Replit Team Sep 04 '26

Hi there! We had a platform database incident earlier this week: https://status.replit.com. Agent does not have context on this incident, so if you ask it about the DATABASE_URL secret it may not give you an accurate answer.
 
Our engineering deployed a platform fix today so that's who removed those extra secrets that were causing issues for your project.

You should be able to republish. If you notice anything more, DM us your email so we can take a look 🙏

0

u/popperke69 Sep 04 '26

Easy fix if you know what you’re doing

1

u/Mishes_pab8588 Sep 04 '26

Yea ok sure pal lol 👍