Your deployment history shows a pattern that explains this: deployments are being cancelled before they complete. On January 31st, there were multiple rapid deploy-cancel cycles within a 12-minute window, with variable changes triggering new deployments every 3-4 minutes. When you change variables quickly in succession, each change triggers a new deployment that cancels the previous one. The variables only take effect once a deployment finishes successfully. Let a single deployment run to completion after setting DATABASE_URL, and the variable should be available to your application. If you're using a Dockerfile and need the variable during the build phase (not just runtime), you must declare it with ARG DATABASE_URL in your Dockerfile since Railway doesn't automatically inject variables at build time for Dockerfile builds.