Hello!

I am trying to use Railway to install Discourse, the open source forum software. I see other have tried and failed but I decided begginers luck may be on my side.

I am doing this via Docker Hub, i found here in the help station the correct way to enter it: discourse/base:release-stable. It connects and, according to it, it deploys successfully, so we are kind of there. However, the application wont run. When i try to access the public URL (whether railway's or my cutom domain, i always get the same error:

Application failed to respond

This error appears to be caused by the application.

If this is your project, check out your deploy logs to see what went wrong. Refer to our docs on Fixing Common Errors for help, or reach out over our Help Station.

If you are a visitor, please contact the application owner or try again later.

Request ID:
0_0CW1DqSIOe56uax0SSRg_2020806880

I thought the issue may have to do with the fact the Discourse, acccording to their installation instructions (https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md#5-install-prerequisites-for-docker-debianubuntu-based-distro-example) would need me to run this command:

./discourse-setup

which is not possible in railway because we dont have SSH. Chat GPT said the command only sets some env vars, and as long as i set them, that step would not be necessary (i do not agree, i believe it does more than that). Well, i setup all the env vars but the app still wont run.

I checked the HTTP logs and this is what i see whenever i try to access the app:

requestId:"yEpNwt2mTZy4HcTlgZbC1w_3165824431"

timestamp:"2025-01-25T02:58:41.271858465Z"

method:"GET"

path:"/"

host:"celebrated-commitment-production.up.railway.app"

httpStatus:502

upstreamProto:"HTTP/1.1"

downstreamProto:"HTTP/2.0"

responseDetails:"failed to forward request to upstream: connection dial timeout"

totalDuration:5055

upstreamAddress:"http://[fd12:1e08:e01a:0:a000:5:993c:347]:3000"

clientUa:"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

upstreamRqDuration:5000

txBytes:4690

rxBytes:765

srcIp:"181.1.241.204"

edgeRegion:"us-east4"

Jan 24 23:58:46

GET

/favicon.ico

502

5.00s

requestId:"i0eNtCPJSaWW-6QLJ_WEiA_3165824431"

timestamp:"2025-01-25T02:58:46.502292000Z"

method:"GET"

path:"/favicon.ico"

host:"celebrated-commitment-production.up.railway.app"

httpStatus:502

upstreamProto:"HTTP/1.1"

downstreamProto:"HTTP/2.0"

responseDetails:"failed to forward request to upstream: connection dial timeout"

totalDuration:5000

upstreamAddress:"http://[fd12:1e08:e01a:0:a000:5:993c:347]:3000"

clientUa:"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

upstreamRqDuration:5000

txBytes:120

rxBytes:699

srcIp:"181.1.241.204"

edgeRegion:"us-east4"

When i check the logs, I see a long string of "starting container - stopping container":

Starting Container

level:"info"

deployment: 10a9d5a6-3bb1-430f-9718-a578f44c6e5f

replica: a4348f6a-d1b3-41e2-b530-1d2fdee0b752

service: e0d241ea-548e-4975-a950-2d4489983bdf

View in ContextCopy as JSON

Jan 24 23:58:23

celebrated-commitment

Stopping Container

level:"info"

deployment: a9934dbd-58d6-4f8d-85c7-f3bb12f4b4c8

replica: 32ddbfb8-97ff-4be6-9c0c-930636478620

service: e0d241ea-548e-4975-a950-2d4489983bdf

View in ContextCopy as JSON

So, here I am, with no idea where to go to continue debugging. All fixes and steps provided by discourse requiere SSH access (still, I don't know what my problem is).

I also installed railway cli, and tried to run "railway logs" in the terminal, and the response was

Starting container...

and it died there.

Discourse is a great software and a prime candidate for being used in Railway, but i am affraid there are no records of those who tried ever succeding.

Any pointers? I am deffinitely not an expert here, so anything helps.

Thanks!