Hello,

Following up on my previous ticket regarding the PHP GD extension installation, I have a few more questions regarding container behavior and running background processes on Railway.

I'm currently hosting a Laravel backend application here, and I ran into a weird issue with our "Forgot PIN/OTP" feature. When users request an OTP from the frontend, it often fails or doesn't process correctly. However, when I manually run railway run php artisan config:clear and cache:clear via the Railway CLI, the exact same request suddenly works perfectly.

It seems like the container configuration or state is heavily cached, causing the application to stall on handling these runtime states until a manual cache clear is triggered.

Additionally, as this project scales, I need to run Laravel Reverb (Websockets) and a Queue Worker (if needed for otp) (php artisan queue:work) which both require persistent daemon processes running 24/7 in the background.

Could you give me some guidance on:

1. How can I prevent this configuration caching issue during runtime? Is there a specific setup I should tweak in my railway.json or deployment settings?
2. What is the best practice or recommended approach on Railway to run persistent terminal commands like php artisan reverb:start and php artisan queue:work alongside the main web server? Do I need to set up separate services or use a specific process manager within the same container?

Looking forward to your guidance on the GD extension, the OTP caching issue, and the background workers. Thank you!

Hey! a lot of things going on here...

About PHP extensions first, you're using Railpack, so Nixpacks configurations won't apply as they're entirely different builders and Nixpacks is deprecated.

Have you tried setting a RAILPACK_PHP_EXTENSIONS env var? It also reads extensions from composer.json

See the docs: https://railpack.com/languages/php#php-extensions

Now about your other issue, railway run runs locally, on your machine, does it send the PIN/OTP via email? Because to be able to use SMTP port on Railway you need to be on the Pro plan or above.

See: https://docs.railway.com/networking/outbound-networking#email-delivery

Thanks for the info Medim! That answers my SMTP and PHP extension question — PHP extension already installed, and i'll need to use an HTTP-based email API instead.

Following up on that, do you have any recommendations for a transactional email service that:

• Works via HTTP API (not SMTP) so it works on Railway free plan
• Can send to any recipient without requiring custom domain verification
• Has a free tier suitable for a student project
• Allows a non-personal sender address

I tried Resend but it only allows sending to my own registered email without domain verification. Is there a service you'd recommend that doesn't have this restriction?

*note: please tag me once it's been answered

@Abduuu. Maybe piisend.com? I've never used their services though.

Oh, okay then. I’ll try it tomorrow. If it still doesn’t work, do I have to get the Pro Plan for $20 to use the SMTP service? I’m also using a Google app password for the SMTP

Yeah, you would need to upgrade to the Pro plan and redeploy your services.

resend.com is great

Thank you all for your help. I’ve decided to purchase a domain name and use the Resend service.