Hey! I believe the one-click Cloudflare setup fails because of a bug in Cloudflare's Domain Connect flow (the "URL is not verified" error hits other providers too, not just Railway). Skip it and just add the records manually.

The NXDOMAIN happens because neither record actually exists in your zone yet. I checked diggiest-staging.com directly and it's correctly on Cloudflare, but api.diggiest-staging.com and _railway-verify.api.diggiest-staging.com both return NXDOMAIN. The hostname doesn't resolve because nothing was created.

The fix is, in Cloudflare, go to DNS → Records → Add record, and create both

TYPE: CNAME

Name: api

Value: qyomxfu8.up.railway.app (i got this from your screen recording)

Proxy: DNS only (grey cloud)

TYPE: TXT

Name: _railway-verify.api

Value: "railway-verify=..." (full value from the Railway panel)

Proxy: Not Applicable

Save both, wait a few minutes. Railway should verify and provision automatically, and the NXDOMAIN clears once the CNAME propagates.

I know you can check in a terminal with nslookup api.diggiest-staging.com after a bit.

I tried to set it up manually and even though I see green cloud on railway, which I read as an indication that the connection is ready, I get the same error (DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN on the browser and server can't find api.diggiest-staging.com: NXDOMAIN by nslookup)

This is after I waited for 10 minutes.