In trying to hook up my app to the healthcheck path I kept getting “service unavailable” errors. By looking up on the help site I found out that:if you use a custom domain with an auto-selected $PORT you should really set your own manually, otherwise the health check might not know which port to use. I fixed it in my project, still failed.there is a bug with the V2 runtime that requires your app to listen to [::] on IPv6 or the healthcheck will fail. Mine was listening to 0.0.0.0 IPv4 only, so I fixed that in the gunicorn configuration. Still Failed.lastly, and this is not documented anywhere as far as I can tell, the healthcheck will send over a host header of healthcheck.railway.app to your app. In my case, I had to add that to my Django ALLOWED_HOSTS settings. This, plus fixing the above two, finally worked!Needless to say, finding out all this info piecemeal from various help posts and Sentry logs was less than ideal. Can some / all of this be added to the documentation? The [::] issue was mentioned as a V2 bug that was not going to be documented because it was going to be fixed about 3 months ago. Personally, I’d say it’s better to temporarily document it, even if it’s a bug, and amend the docs later, rather than waste customers’ time, but hey.Thanks!

Better documentation for health checks

verbosus

PROOP

a year ago

In trying to hook up my app to the healthcheck path I kept getting “service unavailable” errors. By looking up on the help site I found out that:

if you use a custom domain with an auto-selected $PORT you should really set your own manually, otherwise the health check might not know which port to use. I fixed it in my project, still failed.
there is a bug with the V2 runtime that requires your app to listen to [::] on IPv6 or the healthcheck will fail. Mine was listening to 0.0.0.0 IPv4 only, so I fixed that in the gunicorn configuration. Still Failed.
lastly, and this is not documented anywhere as far as I can tell, the healthcheck will send over a host header of healthcheck.railway.app to your app. In my case, I had to add that to my Django ALLOWED_HOSTS settings. This, plus fixing the above two, finally worked!

Needless to say, finding out all this info piecemeal from various help posts and Sentry logs was less than ideal. Can some / all of this be added to the documentation? The [::] issue was mentioned as a V2 bug that was not going to be documented because it was going to be fixed about 3 months ago. Personally, I’d say it’s better to temporarily document it, even if it’s a bug, and amend the docs later, rather than waste customers’ time, but hey.

Thanks!

Solved

7 Replies

melissa

PRO

a year ago

Wow sorry to hear you had such a bad experience @verbosus. This is awesome feedback, I've created a ticket and we'll make these docs better asap. Thank you so much for letting us know

Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway • over 1 year ago

brody

EMPLOYEE

a year ago

Hey Antonio,

Thank you for this feedback!

1. This is now documented - https://docs.railway.app/guides/healthchecks-and-restarts#configure-healthcheck-port

That issue was fixed within a week and is no longer needed, I would greatly appreciate it if you could link to that thread so I can close it out as solved.
Good point, right now that info is kinda "if you know you know" and that absolutely shouldn't be the case, I will be integrating that information into the health check docs.

No need to document the IPv6 requirement since it was fixed within a week, Again, thank you for your feedback!

verbosus

PROOP

a year ago

Hey Brody, the topic where you mention the [::] bug is here. In there, you wrote it would be fixed, but never followed up to write it was actually fixed, so we had no way of knowing.

Status changed to Awaiting Railway Response Railway • over 1 year ago

brody

EMPLOYEE

a year ago

Thank you for the link, and sorry for leaving that thread unresolved, back then I didn't work for Railway so I had no good way of keeping track of threads once the reported issue was solved.

Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway • over 1 year ago

verbosus

PROOP

a year ago

Thank you. Let’s wait until healthcheck.railway.app is added to the docs before closing this thread?

Status changed to Awaiting Railway Response Railway • over 1 year ago

brody

EMPLOYEE

a year ago

For sure! I already created a ticket attached to this thread so that I can update you when it's added to the docs.

Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway • over 1 year ago

brody

EMPLOYEE

a year ago

Hello!

We now have docs to cover the healthcheck hostname - https://docs.railway.app/guides/healthchecks-and-restarts#healthcheck-hostname

Status changed to Solved brody • over 1 year ago