You have two apps, a frontend and a backend, meaning you will need two Railway services, one for the frontend and one for the backend.

I've tried to configure the build process in the backend's package.json to handle building both the frontend and backend together

From my experience having your backend do that just complicates things significantly.

it seems Railway's environment does not support changing directories (cd ..)

It does, but it should never be done since there are always better ways, it also creates an extraordinarily fragile build system.

Please share your repository so that I can give specific help.

https://github.com/IronJosh786/Social-Media-App

Did you have an AI write that railway.toml file? its not even remotely close to being valid syntax.

yeah, i don't know how to write one

Neither does the AI haha.

Give me a few minutes to look that repo over and come up with a plan.

cool

In the mean time, can you send a screenshot of your Railway project?

Some code changes are going to be needed for an optimal deployment.

Removes lines 17, 35, 37, 39-41 from your app.js file in the backend.

basically the stuff which tells backend to serve files from dist, right?

Looks like you've been trying for quite some time now, well get you deployed!

basically the stuff which tells backend to serve files from dist, right?

exactly!

While you make these code changes, you should remove the repo from the service from within the service settings.

disconnect this, right?

Correct, we'll connect it back later, but for now we don't need Railway trying to deploy every little code change you make until we are ready.

Theres going to be a few more code changes, so let me know when you have done the removal of those lines, and we can move on to the next steps!

pushed just now

Remove your build script stuff from the backend's package.json, none of it will be applicable going forward.

And if you have any build or start commands set in your Railway service settings, remove them.

done

For simplicity's sake, can you rename your current service to just Backend and attach a new screenshot of your project after that, please?

Is this fine?

Yep!

Can I assume you already have your service variables set up? like MONGODB_URI

yes all of them

Okay I think the backend is in order, go ahead and connect the repo to the service and make sure you set the root directory to /backend

yeah, its live

Lets see the deploy logs please.

how to share logs?

https://bookmarklets.up.railway.app/log-downloader/

here it is

Those are the build logs, please send the deployment logs.

this is the one

Okay looks good.

https://github.com/brody192/vite-react-template

Copy the nixpacks.toml and Caddyfile from this repo into your frontend folder.

done

Add a new empty service to the Railway project, and name it Frontend

Make sure to generate a domain for it.

root dir will be frontend, right?

Yes.

depoly logs

Looks good to me, does it work?

cors issue, i will need to change the cors from localhost to frontend domain right?

Yep!

its working

All good?

i think i will have to include credentials now with each request where it is required

earlier i had it on render where both frontend and backend were like a single service so i did not need to do it

Yeah that's not an ideal deployment strategy.

What you have now is most optimal.

i see… i also learned a different way of serving content over the web where both frontend and backend are on different domains

so thank you!

Fun fact that's how Railway does it too, the dashboard and blackboard are on different domains!

i mean, i knew that big companies have their backend and frontend on different domains but could never do it. When i deployed my first application, i had the frontend on vercel and backend on render but could not achieve the desired result. Then i switched to using just render. I was not satisfied with it so now thought of trying this.

Well I hope you are happy with Railway!

I am overwhelmed with joy from the support i received.

Thank you! happy to help!