Custom domain stuck — Let's Encrypt cert never provisioned
emilianpopa
PROOP

a month ago

I have a custom domain stuck in a state where DNS is fully propagated and Railway reports syncStatus: ACTIVE, but Let's Encrypt has never been asked to issue a certificate — the certificates array stays empty indefinitely.

Details:

Project: Ilara Data Brief (id 686d7b47-51d4-4475-8efa-fdfb72e6c366)

Service: ilara-data-brief (id c8b0ef53-7293-4082-b479-cf8300cfd31f)

Environment: production (id 03d54100-34b0-49c4-ad01-fdde1188d0fd)

Custom domain: data.ilara.health (customDomain id 60d71943-bf77-4021-ae51-b8ab8d50f30b)

What's working:

DNS resolves correctly from Google, Cloudflare, Quad9 (data.ilara.health CNAME → 015i5b32.up.railway.app)

Railway API reports DNS_RECORD_STATUS_PROPAGATED and syncStatus: ACTIVE

No CAA records blocking

Other *.ilara.health subdomains have working LE certs on different Railway projects (e.g. emr.ilara.health), so it's not rate-limiting

What's stuck:

customDomain.status.certificates returns []

crt.sh shows zero LE issuance attempts for data.ilara.health

HTTPS serves Railway's wildcard fallback (*.up.railway.app) instead of a cert for our domain

What I've tried:

Delete and recreate the customDomain twice (yesterday and today). Each time Railway issues a new edge target, GoDaddy CNAME updated to match, status goes to ACTIVE — cert still never provisions.

First domain attempted was brief.ilara.health (now deleted) — exact same failure pattern, so it's not subdomain-specific.

Could someone manually trigger cert issuance for data.ilara.health on this service?

Solved$20 Bounty

Pinned Solution

You need to add a TXT record to _railway-verify.data.ilara.health. You can find the content for the TXT record under the verificationToken property under status.

2 Replies

Railway
BOT

a month ago

This thread has been marked as public for community involvement, as it does not contain any sensitive or personal information. Any further activity in this thread will be visible to everyone.

Status changed to Open Railway about 1 month ago


You need to add a TXT record to _railway-verify.data.ilara.health. You can find the content for the TXT record under the verificationToken property under status.


a month ago

0x is probably right here: the CNAME side looks fine, but the ownership TXT doesn’t seem visible publicly yet.

From here I can see:

data.ilara.health -> 015i5b32.up.railway.app

but this returns nothing for me:

_railway-verify.data.ilara.health

So Railway may be marking the DNS target as active, but still not starting cert issuance because it can’t verify ownership.

In GoDaddy, since the zone is ilara.health, the TXT host/name is usually _railway-verify.data, not necessarily the full _railway-verify.data.ilara.health, depending on the UI. Value should be exactly the verificationToken Railway shows.

I’d check it from outside GoDaddy after saving:

dig +short TXT _railway-verify.data.ilara.health
dig +short CNAME data.ilara.health

Once both are public, then remove/re-add only if Railway still refuses to issue the cert.


Status changed to Solved 0x5b62656e5d 7 days ago


Welcome!

Sign in to your Railway account to join the conversation.

Loading...