Chapter 13: Wrong information about server action error handling

[aabuhijleh]

This chapter suggests that uncaught server action exceptions can be caught using an error.tsx error boundary component. However, based on my experience, this behavior only works in development mode.

In production, it seems to behave differently. Instead of rendering the content from my error boundary, I’m seeing this generic message:

Application error: a server-side exception has occurred (see the server logs for more information).

This raises several questions:

• Is this the expected behavior in production?
• If so, how are developers supposed to handle uncaught exceptions effectively?

Should we be wrapping server actions in try/catch blocks and manually sending errors to the client for handling? Or is there a recommended approach that I might be missing?

Next.js version: 15

[leerob]

Thank you, I will make this more clear

Docs: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/getting-started/error-handling