Tough to give you a definitive direction without more information but here is what I can say

Railway automatically assigns a PORT environment variable that your application needs to use. The issue is likely that your Medusa server is hardcoded to port 9000, but Railway expects it to bind to the dynamically assigned port.

Solution: Ensure your Medusa configuration uses the Railway-provided PORT:

// In your server startup
const port = process.env.PORT || 9000;

If you are using Medusa v2, check your medusa config as well

module.exports = {
  projectConfig: {
    http: {
      port: process.env.PORT || 9000,
      host: "0.0.0.0" // Important: bind to all interfaces
    }
  }
}

To answer your questions more directly

1. Port configuration for Railway: Yes - you need to configure your Medusa server to use process.env.PORT instead of hardcoded port 9000, and bind to host 0.0.0.0.

2. medusa develop vs production command: No - medusa develop is not compatible with Railway deployments. Use medusa start for production instead.

3. Debugging live but unresponsive process:

• Check Railway deployment logs for errors after "Server is ready"

• Verify the server is binding to Railway's assigned PORT (not 9000)

• Confirm host is set to 0.0.0.0 not localhost

• Add a /health endpoint to test basic connectivity

The most likely issue is your server binding to port 9000 on localhost instead of Railway's dynamic port on all interfaces.

The answer by @anthonysette is most likely AI, so it's hard to read, I'll give my own answer.

It could be a port binding issue. Railway sets its own PORT env var and your app has to listen to that, not hardcoded 9000. Also make sure it's binding to 0.0.0.0, not localhost, or it won’t be accessible from the outside.

Make sure to not use medusa develop on Railway as that’s for local dev. Use medusa start or whatever your prod start script is.

This is how to do it in medusa-config.js: serverPort: process.env.PORT || 9000 so it isn't hardcoded and uses Railway's PORT env var.