Hello Railway Team,

I am re-submitting this issue as I have not received a resolution in my previous thread and the problem persists, causing continuous service crashes. My project is captivating-encouragement.

Core Problem: My beat service consistently fails to connect to the PostgreSQL database with the error: django.db.utils.OperationalError: could not translate host name "postgres.railway.internal" to address: Name or service not known.

Current Service Status:

• web service: Running successfully, connects to PostgreSQL and Redis.

• worker service: Running successfully, connects to Redis.

• beat service: CRASHING due to persistent PostgreSQL hostname resolution failure.

Critical Issue Discovered - Railway Service References NOT resolving: When following your previous advice to use Service References (${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}} and ${{Redis.REDIS_URL}}) in the Railway dashboard environment variables, the literal string$(Postgres.DATABASE_URL) (or similar) was passed into my application's environment. This led to dj_database_url.UnknownSchemeError: Scheme '://' is unknown. This indicates that Railway's Service Reference system is not resolving these variables into actual URLs for my project.

Troubleshooting Steps Taken (All changes pushed to GitHub):

1. Environment Variables:

   • Initially tried your recommended Service References (${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}, ${{Redis.REDIS_URL}}). Failed because they did not resolve into actual URLs.

   • Currently, I have reverted to manually setting the hardcoded internal URLs for DATABASE_URL and REDIS_URL in the Railway dashboard variables for ALL services (web, worker, beat).

     • DATABASE_URL: postgresql://postgres:<redacted>@postgres.railway.internal:5432/railway

     • REDIS_URL: redis://default:<redacted>@redis.railway.internal:6379

   • This enabled web and worker services to connect successfully.

2. Django settings.py:

   • Updated to use os.environ.get() for DATABASE_URL and REDIS_URL with robust parsing (handling empty strings) as per your general recommendations.

   • Removed debug print statements.

3. Procfile:

   • Simplified commands as recommended:

     web: python manage.py migrate --noinput && python manage.py collectstatic --noinput && gunicorn kokkai_website.wsgi
     worker: celery -A kokkai_website worker --loglevel=info
     beat: celery -A kokkai_website beat --loglevel=info
     
     

   • Even added sleep 5 to the beat command (beat: sh -c "sleep 5 && celery -A kokkai_website beat --loglevel=info") as a test, but the PostgreSQL hostname resolution error persisted.

Problem persists for beat service: Despite web and worker now running with the direct internal URLs, the beat service continues to fail with the Name or service not known error for postgres.railway.internal. This specific issue for beat suggests a platform-level networking or DNS resolution problem unique to that service's container within my project, given that web can connect to the same PostgreSQL database.

Request: I kindly request an urgent investigation from the Railway engineering team into these two critical issues:

1. Why are Service References (${{...}}) not resolving into actual URLs in my project's environment variables?

2. Why does the beat service specifically fail to resolve postgres.railway.internal, even when other services within the same project can, and when direct internal URLs are used?

My project is currently incurring costs without full functionality. Your prompt assistance is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.