Is there anything wrong with keeping Magento 2 in Developer Mode?

Question

Anytime I switch to production mode, the system does not display the product images on the product pages. The wheel just keeps rotating. This only happens in production mode. I have compiled, flushed, deployed static content, flushed static content, everything.

But switching my Magento 2.1 (PHP 7.0) into production mode makes a spinning wheel for my product images on the product page, and, a spinning wheel after logging into the backend.

Don't even know where I can debug this or look for errors.

Answer 1

Solution:

In case anyone else is having the same problem: the issue was not with production mode. Its the enabling of merging and compressing CSS and JS files on the backend. That was it. Its a known bug in Magento, and they are still working on this issue. I wish I didnt waste 3 weeks trying to figure this out !

Answer 2

Keeping Magento in developer mode is not recommended. Instead I would recommend you to debug the issue until you find what is wrong and fixed it.

Keeping Magento in Developer Model will:

• Slow down the system as well the user experience since the static view files are not served from pub/static and instead generated every time a page is reloaded.
• Display errors and exceptions to the users.

http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/config-guide/bootstrap/magento-modes.html

Regarding the issue and for what you are saying it could be and issue related to the generation of the static content.

• Have you deployed the static content after switched to production mode?
• Do you get any warning/error when switch between modes or deploying the static content?
• Have you cleared cache?
• If you inspect the code in your browser after switch to production, can you spot any error?
• Is your web server well configured to serve those static files?

When deploying the static content, you can use -vv at the end to get a more verbose output.

magento setup:static-content:deploy -vv

Hope this help you find/fix your issue and change your mind about keep your application running in developer mode.