Hey, this looks like a Railway-side validation bug rather than an intentional restriction — .live is a legitimate ICANN-approved TLD and Railway's docs don't list any blocked TLDs.

Here's what to try:

1. Try adding it as a subdomain first

Instead of swahili.live, try www.swahili.live — sometimes Railway's domain input has issues with bare apex domains on certain TLDs.

1. Contact Railway support directly

Go to railway.com → Help → Contact Support and report it as a bug. Mention:

The exact domain: swahili.live

That other TLDs work fine but .live is rejected at input

Ask them to whitelist it or fix the validation regex

1. Use the Railway CLI as a workaround

bash

railway domain add swahili.live

The add domain button is inactive with the .live domain

can u share the screenshot

Attached. I remove the last e for comparison which seems to work and it's a non existent tld. So it seems .live has been deliberately prohibited

You're right that .live appears to be deliberately blocked on Railway's end. Here's what you can do:

Workaround 1 — Cloudflare Workers (Best option)

Add swahili.live to Cloudflare (free)

Point Cloudflare to your Railway app's .up.railway.app domain using a Worker or proxy rule

Your site runs on swahili.live effectively — Railway never needs to know about it

Workaround 2 — Cloudflare SSL + Proxy

Add swahili.live to Cloudflare

Set a CNAME pointing to your xxx.up.railway.app domain

Enable orange cloud (proxy ON)

Cloudflare handles SSL and forwards traffic to Railway

You never need to add the domain inside Railway at all

This is probably the easiest and fastest fix — Railway just sees traffic coming from Cloudflare, it doesn't care about the domain name.

can u try the workaround once

cheers

I would be careful with the Cloudflare workaround here: simply proxying swahili.live to the *.up.railway.app domain may still fail, because Railway custom domains normally need to be added to the service and verified with the TXT record before Railway routes requests for that Host header.

Since your screenshot shows the Add button disabled for .live while even a non-existent TLD is accepted, this looks like frontend/domain-validation behavior rather than DNS propagation.

Two practical checks:

1. Try the CLI/API path to see whether this is only a dashboard validation issue:

railway domain add swahili.live --service <service>

The CLI should either return the required CNAME/TXT records or expose the real validation error.

If the CLI also rejects .live, this likely needs Railway to fix/clarify the TLD validation. Include the domain, screenshot, and the fact that swahili.liv enables the button while swahili.live disables it.

Railway domain docs say custom domains should return CNAME + TXT records and both are required for routing/verification:

https://docs.railway.com/networking/domains/working-with-domains

https://docs.railway.com/cli/domain

The Cloudflare workaround CAN still work if you do it properly:

Add swahili.live to Cloudflare

Point CNAME to xxx.up.railway.app

Use a Cloudflare Worker to rewrite the Host header to xxx.up.railway.app before forwarding

export default {

async fetch(request) {

const url = new URL(request.url)

url.hostname = "xxx.up.railway.app"

return fetch(url.toString(), {

  headers: {

    ...request.headers,

    "host": "xxx.up.railway.app"

  }

})

}

}

This means Railway only ever sees its own .up.railway.app domain in the Host header — it never knows about swahili.live. Cloudflare handles the public-facing domain completely.

but yes i do agree that CLI should be the first thing to try before anything else, because if it's only a frontend validation bug, the CLI bypasses it instantly with no workarounds needed. I mentioned it to on the first reply itself

Hey, just a heads up. I don't think that it's Railway not allowing .live TLDs but rather that this specific domain has already been attached to some Railway service in the past.

.live TLDs in general work:

Using a domain that has already been used on Railway (for example railway.dating) would result in it not being available.

I just registered this domain yesterday and haven't used it on railway.