15 days ago
Hi everyone,
I’m trying to deploy Discourse on Railway using the official template.
The build completes, but the container never passes the healthcheck stage.
Here’s the relevant part of the log:
====================
Starting Healthcheck
====================
Path: /srv/status
Retry window: 5m0s
Attempt #1 failed with service unavailable. Continuing to retry for 4m59s
...
Attempt #13 failed with service unavailable.
1/1 replicas never became healthy!
Healthcheck failed!My setup:
PostgreSQL, Redis, and Sidekiq are installed and running fine
Environment variables set according to the template (DISCOURSE_HOSTNAME, DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS, SMTP settings, etc.)
No customizations made yet
It looks like the app container never responds at /srv/status, so Railway marks it as unhealthy.
Has anyone successfully deployed Discourse on Railway or knows what could cause this healthcheck to fail?
Do I need to modify the startup command or the Dockerfile to expose a different healthcheck path?
Any help or working example would be greatly appreciated 
3 Replies
15 days ago
Hey there! We've found the following might help you get unblocked faster:
If you find the answer from one of these, please let us know by solving the thread!
15 days ago
hey, you dont need to change the healthcheck path, /src/status is correct. can you double check that your web app is listening to port 8080? you can also try raising the RAILWAY_HEALTHCHECK_TIMEOUT_SEC to see if that's potentially it according to railway docs. you could just be experiencing a first time load, so increasing it might resolve it.
15 days ago
The issue turned out to be with the Discourse template — it uses a PostgreSQL service without the pgvector extension, which caused the discourse-ai plugin migrations to fail on enable_extension(:vector).
I solved it by deploying a separate pgvector/pgvector:pg16 service and connecting it to Discourse through environment variables. Everything started up successfully afterward.
It would be great to update the official Discourse template to include a PostgreSQL instance with pgvector support.
Status changed to Solved brody • 15 days ago