Search just broke

Question

Searching currently isn't possible on Meta Stack Exchange.

It worked a few minutes ago and all other sites seem to still work. I get directed to this link: https://meta.stackexchange.com/error?aspxerrorpath=/search

Answer 1

Thanks for reporting. This will be fixed in the next build (2017.10.23.27541 on meta).

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Some juicy details for @ShadowWizard

As you may know, we're working on a new channels feature. The code in the faulty build introduced a if (Current.Site != Site.ChannelsRoot) check, and the Site.ChannelsRoot getter throws an exception when there is no channels root site configured. This minor detail wasn't caught on dev, since the configuration there doesn't match prod (no channels on prod yet), nor by any developer locally since it was introduced in a PR (not caught by peer reviewer, only devs who run and have channels configured locally looked at it).

The fix was really simple, since we also have dedicated flags on all sites for checking the same thing, e.g. if (Current.Site.IsChannelsRoot).

But not all is bad as it seems. I already noticed the exceptions in our logs before this bug report, so the fix was already in the pipes before it was reported on meta.