My backend service on Railway repeatedly crashes/restarts (crash loop). When it’s briefly up, some API calls work, then the service dies again. This is impacting auth flows and other API routes.

Stack

• Node.js 20+ / Express

• PostgreSQL (Railway)

• Prisma

• Deployed on Railway (Docker)

• Frontend is separate (Cloudflare Pages)

Service Backend API service (Node/Express). (If the form forces “Service”: select this backend service or select “N/A” if it’s not tied to a specific Railway template.)

Symptoms

• Service restarts repeatedly

• Health endpoints may pass briefly, then fail after restart

• Auth routes fail intermittently / after restart

What I suspect A required environment variable is missing or misconfigured (JWT secret and/or other required config). This is a known critical issue in our deployment notes. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

What I’ve tried

• Verified deployment is pointing to the correct repo/service

• Rebuilt/redeployed the service

• Checked that DATABASE_URL points to the Railway Postgres instance

• Reviewing env var parity vs local .env.example

What I need help with

1. Best way to identify exactly what is triggering the crash loop on Railway (recommended log view / crash reason extraction).

2. Confirmation if Railway is killing the container due to:

   • missing env vars at runtime (e.g., JWT secret),

   • failing health check,

   • out-of-memory,

   • Prisma migrate/generate step failing on boot.

Info that may help you debug

• Backend runs Prisma on startup

• Expected required env vars include (not limited to):

  • NODE_ENV

  • PORT

  • DATABASE_URL

  • JWT_SECRET (critical)

  • plus 3rd party keys if routes initialize them

• Health routes exist: /health, /health/live, /health/ready, /health/detailed

Requested next steps from Railway

• If possible, please point me to the first fatal error in logs right before the restart, and whether the restart is app-exit (crash) vs platform health/OOM termination.

• If there’s a standard Railway checklist for crash loops (health checks / start command / Dockerfile / env var validation), please share.