N/A

should have known there was going to be a setting for this. but in my defense… i did try to search for it and i got no hits. but of course i try now and its there in settings. 🤦‍♂️

thanks Brody!

I wonder if i have to move my custom nixpack.toml into the new root folder… hmmmm

you would likely have the nixpacks.toml in the subfolder and then set the location to it with the NIXPACKS_CONFIG_FILE variable

thanks. just moved it to the subfolder, so I will give that a shot. still find it weird that variables cant be in version control (like PORT 8080)

wdym version control? like github?

yeah

its a variable that controls the platform, so it needs to be set on the platform itself

but side node, there would be no need for you to set a PORT variable yourself as long as your app listens on the automatically generated PORT variable

oh hmmm. i wonder if i can do that on ktor. i guess the auto generated port variable is set as an env variable?

yep it would be an environment variable, and yes you can do it with ktor, remove the PORT variable you set, now railway will randomly assign one behind the scenes, now all your app has to do is read the PORT environment variable and listen on it

very cool. thanks for teaching.

cant seem to get railway to use my /server directory. lmao

what makes you think that?

haha okay well more specifically?

Error: Failed to read Nixpacks config file nixpacks.toml

Caused by:

0: Error reading nixpacks.toml

1: No such file or directory (os error 2)

what did you set that NIXPACKS_CONFIG_FILE to?

its blue

have you not deployed the changes?

I did, I was just changing things back and forth again

Tried
/server
/server/nixpacks.toml
/nixpacks.toml

second option seems like the best

but without seeing your project structure i dont know for sure

oh maybe you dont need to set that variable if the root directory is set, try omitting it

this is my /server

Nope. same issue even if i remove the env variable. already tried that, and just tried again

Error: Failed to read Nixpacks config file nixpacks.toml
Caused by:

0: Error reading nixpacks.toml

1: No such file or directory (os error 2)

you completely removed the NIXPACKS_CONFIG_FILE variable from your service?

but those logs would indicate that its still set

you know what. i bet you i know the issue

i dont think i have a "true" monorepo

the root project is still a gradle project. so i probably actually dont want to change root, but I instead might want to move the nixpacks.toml.

what two apps are in this repo?

i used kmp.jetbrains.com to generate the project

and so i have two mobile apps (ios and android) and a server directory (ktor)

interesting

but yeah. its not a completely isolated project

i.e. isolated monorepo vs shared monorepo

https://docs.railway.app/guides/monorepo#deploying-an-isolated-monorepo

https://docs.railway.app/guides/monorepo#deploying-a-shared-monorepo

yeah this is more like a shared monorepo, and in that case you liking don't want to set a root directory

doesn't seem like its picking up my nixpacks.toml even though its in the root of the project. do i need to set a variable even if its in the root?

yeah. if i just set the build command directly in the railway dashboard then things build properly. not sure why it doesn't like my nixpacks.toml

very odd

ill figure it out. im gettin good at this stuff. 🙂

rubberducking…

i think my nixpacks.toml file is wrong

[build]
buildCommand = './gradlew -p server clean build -x check -x test'

[deploy]
startCommand = 'java $JAVA_OPTS -jar server/build/libs/*-all.jar'

very wrong

did gpt write that for you

no. i used the docs

https://docs.railway.app/reference/config-as-code#nixpacks-config-path

thats for a railway.toml

bah. wheres the nixpacks docs. lmaooo

we can pivot to a railway.toml if thats what you'd like to do?

i guess i dont really care. i was just using what i learned in the last thread (from aleks)

maybe a railway.json would even be best? since it has schema validation

interesting. how does it do schema validation? on the railway side? or can i somehow validate locally?

but anyway. yeah. i did what you said and it worked

the $schema value links to the schema file and then vscode tells you if you did something very wrong

maybe railway.json will be a project for tomorrow.

dont use vscode (using jetbrains fleet) lol.

i cant see why it wouldnt do json validation as well

gotta shut the laptop for a bit. but. let me know if you have any pref between doing a railway.json/toml vs a nixpacks.toml

i am a big fan of config as code. so i want to do that where possible.

i like railway.json by far, since you can embed a nixpacks.toml file into it and have schema validation!

Alright. Going to try to convert to railway.json

i guess if railway.json exists, it'll just use it?

correct

because i just converted the file and everything seems to be building fine

cool

lets see the file you came up with

should i also just add the rest of this stuff?

I just plugged in the file you passed over 🥰

its not needed, unless you want to set that stuff from your railway.json file

sent some trains over. 💸 cheers buddy

ah thanks ❤️

im curious now about this json validation thing. ive never heard of that in my life. lol

not sure if jetbrains fleet is doing any sort of validation for me lol

hey, my first introduction to it was when i edited my first railway.json too!

i can't imagine fleet not doing the schema validation

i guess thats validation in action?

yeah thats it, its not gonna help you make sure what you do is going to do what you want, but it will let you know if what youre doing is not valid

awesome. gonna try the port number thing and get some sleep. hopefully its easy peasy

https://docs.railway.app/reference/variables#railway-provided-variables

Assuming I'm after RAILWAY_TCP_APPLICATION_PORT

even though the docs for that seem wrong? i think its a copy pasta issue

nope, just PORT

hm. howd you find that out? lol. sorry i try to find docs, but did i miss something here?

mainly covered here
and here

thanks. for whatever reason… it seems like RAILWAYTCPAPPLICATION_PORT also worked? unless it actually just defaulted to 8080 and that worked. going to switch to plain ol "PORT" now… 🤞

oooh. very interesting. PORT didn't work…

do you have a tcp proxy on your service? if you do, you shouldn't

i dont believe so

actually

wait. i think it did work

but i had downtime. which caused me to think it didn't work.

ill refer back to the convo we had about health check or w/e

i think this is close enough to what you're running?

a health check and RAILWAY_DEPLOYMENT_OVERLAP_SECONDS set to 35 is what the team (and me) are currently recommending until railway rolls out the new and faster http proxy

okay. so RAILWAYTCPAPPLICATION_PORT doesn't actually work. it was because if i can't find the env variable defined, then it chooses 8080

and somehow using 8080 as a default works now.

or actually. nope.

so the goal here would be to not have a PORT variable defined on your service

looks like its just a nice long delay again that was misleading me.

I'm just doing this

fun main() {
    val serverPort: String =
        try {
            System.getenv("BLAH")
        } catch (e: Exception) {
            "8080"
        }

    embeddedServer(Netty, port = serverPort.toInt(), host = "0.0.0.0", module = Application::module)
        .start(wait = true)
}

BLAH?

so basically. before I just had

val serverPort: String = "8080"

BLAH is just me trying to break stuff and seeing if it works

gotcha

which i thought it did. but it was the previoius instance still working

so just to check, does your railway service have a PORT service variable set?

nope

variables are empty at the moment

switching back over to

val serverPort: String =
    try {
        System.getenv("PORT")
    } catch (e: Exception) {
        "8080"
    }

good

and will see if that works

cool. yep that works.

no PORT variable declaration needed. noice. another thing that can be tucked away as code.

thanks!

i do wonder why my ktor server somehow says it starts up at 55:44, but can't actually handle requests until about 30 seconds later. at 56:19

yeah its super handy how railway does that

the switch over time

gotcha. so its not my server code initialization actually taking 30 seconds. lol

nope

im sure that time will go down when railway rolls out their new http server

cool cool. thats fine. nice to at least know that its out of my control.

running a few more sanity checks with healthcheck endpoint and stuff, but i think im all set 🤞

great!

oh yahhh. works great. awesome. so many great little tips learned today. appreciate it. im essentially getting to a point where i can have a small template for all future ktor projects. love to see it.

happy i could help

1/1 replicas never became healthy!

Healthcheck failed!
never been so happy to see a failure lol

lol i assume you planned that

yep

System.getenv("BLAH")

just making sure the healthcheck worked as expected when it defaulted to 8080 and couldn't actually startup

thanks again. night 💤

no problem!

heh. i was able to see the railway 404 page or w/e even with the healthcheck and timeout of 500. no storage or db attached to this server.

Attempt #1 failed with service unavailable. Continuing to retry for 4m59s

[1/1] Healthcheck succeeded!

so for a split second my server went down. you think im missing anything else here? (i know the last time this happened we narrowed it down to the fact that i had some storage attached). but none of that this time.

RAILWAY_DEPLOYMENT_OVERLAP_SECONDS set to 35 should do the trick

aha. so thats diff from "Healthcheck Timeout"

yep. that seemed to do the trick. couldn't repro the railway 404 page.

excellent. ill make sure to add that to my default template as well (see, thats something id love to add to railway.json)

lol. sat there again and just tried cmd + r to refresh over and over and over and i was able to see the downtime page for a split second.

unfortunately that looks like the best we can do with the current http proxy

bumped to RAILWAYDEPLOYMENTOVERLAP_SECONDS to 60. and couldn't repro.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

might do a few more sanity checks tomorrow. sleep for real this time. lmao

sounds good!