Custom domain stuck in "Validating ownership" — certificate never ▎ issues
prguzzi-cmyk
HOBBYOP

23 days ago

Subject:

▎ Hi Railway team,

▎ A custom domain on my service has been stuck at "Validating ownership" for

▎ several hours and the TLS certificate never issues. It keeps serving the

▎ default *.up.railway.app cert, so the domain fails over HTTPS.

▎ Details:

▎ - Project: grant-gold (39a9a782-1125-4077-9b24-67d1553be05a)

▎ - Service: grant-gold, Environment: production

▎ - Custom domain: http://www.nonprofitaid.org

▎ - Target CNAME: u569tj34.up.railway.app

▎ What I've verified on my side:

▎ - DNS is correct and your dashboard shows the record PROPAGATED

▎ (www.nonprofitaid.org → u569tj34.up.railway.app, confirmed via public

▎ resolvers).

▎ - No CAA records on the domain (Let's Encrypt is permitted).

▎ - I removed a previously-added apex domain (nonprofitaid.org) that

▎ couldn't validate, in case it was blocking issuance — no change.

▎ - My app passes /.well-known/ paths through (ACME challenges aren't

▎ redirected).

▎ Despite all of this, the cert status stays at "Validating ownership" and

▎ never completes. Could you re-trigger / force certificate issuance for

www.nonprofitaid.org, or tell me what's blocking it on your end?

▎ Thanks!

$10 Bounty

3 Replies

Railway
BOT

23 days ago

This thread has been opened as a bounty so the community can help solve it.

Status changed to Open Railway 23 days ago


Delete the custom domain and re-add it after 10 minutes

In Railway, remove www.nonprofitaid.org.

Leave the DNS CNAME unchanged:

www.nonprofitaid.org → u569tj34.up.railway.app

Wait 10–15 minutes.

Add www.nonprofitaid.org back to the service.

Why this one? Because your DNS is already showing PROPAGATED. The most common failure mode at that point is a stuck ownership-validation or certificate-provisioning state in Railway's domain system. Removing and re-adding the domain forces Railway to create a fresh validation and certificate request.

Before doing it, verify there is only one DNS record for www and that it's the CNAME to u569tj34.up.railway.app. No A records, AAAA records, or Cloudflare proxying.


also as a personal rule i set for myself i always change the name of the generated domain railway generates.. i dont know why but i never had a dns problem sice doing that..


You need to add a TXT record at _railway-verify.www.nonprofitaid.org. Railway uses TXT records to verify domain ownership. If you are using the API to add your custom domain, you can find it in verificationToken under status


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