> TL;DR: Every push-triggered deploy on this service has failed at SNAPSHOT_CODE since 2026-05-09. Manual redeploys of pre-2026-05-09 cached snapshots still succeed. Looks like a platform-side regression in the snapshot analyzer.

Service

- Project: Expert Field Notes — 4d62f3f5-c363-4a9b-bd04-c357671477ae

- Service: crcg-news-synthesis — 36dbb34f-4067-4291-acc0-cce189f4b0a6

- Environment: production — 0aedc9c5-b708-4d95-9564-27b418b58c73

- Repo: nmarkman/crcg-news-synthesis — monorepo; service root is field-notes/

Failure

Every fresh build emits this contradictory log sequence at SNAPSHOT_CODE:

```

root directory set as 'field-notes'

config-as-code path set as 'railway.toml'

found 'Dockerfile' at 'field-notes/Dockerfile'

found 'railway.toml' at 'field-notes/railway.toml'

root directory sanitized to 'field-notes'

service config at 'railway.toml' not found

```

The analyzer finds railway.toml, sanitizes the root directory, then reports the same file as not found. Build is abandoned in 9–14 seconds with no Docker step.

- Most recent failure: deployment 7e2315c8-c190-47f4-9629-9753feb8c0a7 (commit 20107d2, 2026-05-10)

- Last success: deployment 12a66122-894b-4b80-a3c3-5f72420edd5b (2026-05-08, manual redeploy of a pre-bug cached snapshot — currently serving prod)

Railway's own diagnostic tool agrees this is platform-side — quoting its output:

> "This deployment is failing due to a platform-side issue in Railway's snapshot analyzer. The analyzer correctly finds railway.toml at field-notes/railway.toml but then fails to load it, reporting 'service config at railway.toml not found.' This same error has affected every deployment since 2026-05-09 regardless of code or config changes, and the Railway team will need to investigate."

What I've tried (all hit the same error, or a downstream variant of it):

- source.rootDirectory set to field-notes, /field-notes, and null

- Moved railway.toml to repo root with dockerfilePath = "field-notes/Dockerfile"

- Moved Dockerfile to repo root with dockerfilePath = "Dockerfile"

- Added/removed .dockerignore

- railway up --detach direct upload from local

- Reverted to the original layout that worked pre-2026-05-09 (Dockerfile + railway.toml inside field-notes/, simple COPY . ., rootDirectory = field-notes)

In every case where snapshot-analyze appeared to pass, the build then failed at BuildKit because Railway forced rootDirectory="field-notes" regardless of the service-level config. The deployment record consistently shows rootDirectory: "field-notes" even when getServiceConfigTool returns source.rootDirectory: null.

Current state: repo is back on the original (working pre-bug) configuration at commit 20107d2 on main. Production is healthy on the cached 2026-05-08 snapshot, but no code changes can ship until this is resolved.

Ask: please investigate the snapshot-analyzer regression and reply when it's fixed (or with a workaround that doesn't depend on rootDirectory).