We recently deployed a Rails 8.1 app (Dockerized, Puma, PostgreSQL) and had trouble diagnosing deployment issues because we couldn't see any meaningful logs from our container.

The problem: Our Dockerfile defined the start command via CMD ["./bin/rails", "server", "-b", "0.0.0.0"]. When deploying, the container would get stuck at "Starting Container" with no application logs visible in the Railway dashboard. This made it very difficult to troubleshoot — we couldn't tell if the server was starting, crashing, or failing to connect to the database.

The fix: We moved the start command into a separate bash script (bin/start) and referenced it via startCommand in railway.toml:

```toml

[deploy]

startCommand = "./bin/start"

```

```bash

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -x

./bin/rails s -b 0.0.0.0

```

Once we did this, logs started appearing in the Railway dashboard and we were able to diagnose and resolve our remaining issues.

Question: Is there a known issue with log output visibility when using the Dockerfile's CMD directive vs. startCommand in railway.toml? It seems like the same command behaves differently depending on how it's invoked, at least in terms of log forwarding. Any guidance on the recommended approach would be helpful.