Hello Railway Support,

I'm experiencing a critical issue: environment variables I add in the “Variables” section of my project are not available at runtime inside my deployed app.

Specifically, I'm using os.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY") in Python, but print(repr(os.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY"))) always returns None, even though the variable is correctly set in Railway under that exact name.

What I've tried:

• Variable is named exactly: OPENAI_API_KEY

• Confirmed it's saved and visible in Railway UI

• No .env file is present in the repo

• No load_dotenv() call in the code

• Redeployed the project manually multiple times

Still, the variable is not available at runtime.
This breaks my integration with OpenAI Assistants API.

Could you please help me verify why the environment variable is not reaching the runtime container?

Thanks in advance!