Railway Support — Rewards Production 503 Diagnostic

A) Technical Diagnosis

The Rewards application deployment is healthy at the Railway deployment/container level, but the production root endpoint consistently returns HTTP 503.

The application has been verified locally with a non-empty dummy REWARDS_SESSION_SECRET, where the session configuration is accepted and the root-route missing-secret condition is not triggered. No dotenv/config override was found.

Railway CLI 5.54.1 confirms that REWARDS_SESSION_SECRET is configured for the web service in the production environment and reports it as non-empty, without exposing its value.

However, the running production application behaves as though REWARDS_SESSION_SECRET is absent/falsey.

Railway deployment logs show normal startup and successful /healthz requests, with no evidence of a build failure, container crash, or routing failure.

The remaining issue therefore appears to be at the boundary between Railway's configured production variable and the environment actually resolved into the running application process. This has not been assumed as a confirmed root cause; runtime evidence is required.

B) Exact Railway Identifiers

• Project: sunny-charisma
• Service: web
• Environment: production
• Environment ID: 7fedb950-a05f-474d-8858-262de9b8205c
• Service ID: 154b2cdc-f35d-4b6f-b753-f5bb21bec92f
• Deployment: a9b597c4-416c-443b-959f-c0c6e76a5b31
• Production domain: https://web-production-bf3aa.up.railway.app

C) Exact Observed HTTP Behavior

• GET /healthz → HTTP 200
• GET / → HTTP 503

Deployment logs show:

• Normal container startup
• Rewards web listening on http://127.0.0.1:8080
• Successful /healthz requests
• Repeated / requests returning 503
• No build/container/routing failure identified

Additional Verification

• Railway CLI version: 5.54.1
• REWARDS_SESSION_SECRET is reported as configured and non-empty for the Railway web / production configuration.
• The secret value was never exposed.
• Local application testing with a non-empty dummy REWARDS_SESSION_SECRET succeeds.
• No dotenv/config override was found.
• Railway CLI help confirms railway run and railway shell provide Railway variables to a local process/shell; they do not inspect the environment of the already-running deployment.
• No supported read-only CLI mechanism was identified that can inspect the environment of deployment a9b597c4-416c-443b-959f-c0c6e76a5b31 while returning only secret presence.

D) Remaining Question

Why does the running production deployment behave as though REWARDS_SESSION_SECRET is absent/falsey when Railway's production service configuration reports the variable as present and non-empty?

E) Request to Railway Support

Please inspect the runtime environment/injection state of deployment a9b597c4-416c-443b-959f-c0c6e76a5b31 and determine why REWARDS_SESSION_SECRET is not resolving to the application process, without requiring us to expose the secret value.

Please specifically verify the runtime variable injection/resolution state for this deployment and determine whether the configured production variable is actually being made available to the application process.

No secret value needs to be disclosed.

Change-Control Confirmation

No application files, Railway variables, secrets, deployments, restarts, credentials, or application configuration were modified during this diagnostic preparation.

Production is not fixed.