Hey there! We've found the following might help you get unblocked faster:

• 🧵 Auto-deploy on Github not working
• 🧵 Deployment with actions
• 🧵 Terraform on railway

If you find the answer from one of these, please let us know by solving the thread!

notice the new build is different from old build (all I did was update ENV)

showing my instance is disconnected from branch

Yes, disconnecting and re-connecting will pull the latest commit. Usually we suggest that if you want to "freeze" the state of your deployments, you use a release branch where you only push to when you want there to be changes deployed.

I understand (and disagree from a ux perspective), but why should updating an ENV var behave that way?

Typically an environment variable will change the state of the service, such as deploying a license key, a database connection string, etc, which typically requires a restart of the service.

So why would a restart of a service not "restart the service" and instead pull latest from the branch?

You are deploying from GitHub and the deployment will reflect the current state of the branch you are deploying from. To Angelo's point, you can create a separate branch and connect Railway to that if you wish to manage which commit is deployed.

If you wish to go back to a specific version of your code, you can find the corresponding deployment in the Deployments tab and click the three-dot menu, and then select "Redeploy".

You can read more about Deployment Actions in the Docs.