2 months ago
I'm having repeat issues of this kind - the project I want to set up on Railway has a docker image - great!
Installation is simple. but the service crashes immediately after deploy, because it can't find its config file (different projects expect these in diff places).
I attach a volume - great!
But how to get the config file in there?
I can't SSH in to create it because the service is down.
I make multiple attempts to embed the config file creations and content in the Custom Start command - but boyoboy are there a lot of syntax / format pitfalls in there!
Must be a simpler way? What am I missing?
3 Replies
2 months ago
What kind of config file are you trying to get? Perhaps you can include the file within the image?
2 months ago
go to your service settings → custom start command → paste something like this:
sh -c "mkdir -p /path/to/config && echo 'your config content' > /path/to/config/file.conf && your-normal-start-command"so you're creating the config file right before the app starts. the sh -c wrapper is crucial for docker images, and the && makes sure config is created before your app runs.
if need multiline configs use a heredoc:
sh -c "cat > /data/config.yml << 'EOF'
line 1
line 2
EOF
&& ./start-app"2 months ago
Well that is the solution the AI coached me to, and it did sort of work, but there were continual fails, (as per the question), escaping of special characters and the like - using heredoc seemed to produce new errors each time.
In the end, what worked was a base64 encoding.
Good to know that that's the preferred approach.