9 months ago
Hello,
I'm reaching out because setting up a custom domain for a service has been extremely frustrating and unreliable.
For one environment of my Next.js application, I was only able to configure the domain after ~10+ attempts (that's mind-blowing, but at least it did work at the end).
For another environment, I've been trying for several days without success – the process gets stuck at "Issuing TLS certificate" and never completes.
Same scenario, same steps followed, different outcomes.
For example, I tried to set up both "staging.app.example.com" and "staging-app.example.com". In each case, I created the appropriate CNAME record at Porkbun. Railway then displays "Issuing TLS certificate". To verify, I checked the records using nslookup.io (specifically the Google DNS tab), and everything appears correct: the CNAME is present (and it is the right one), and the A record resolves to Railway's gateway.
Despite this, nothing changes, even after 72 hours.
Why is this process so unreliable? It feels like a lottery at the moment.
Is there something I might be missing, or is this a known issue?
Thank you in advance for any help or feedback.
6 Replies
9 months ago
I finally got my second environment’s custom domain set up as well.
Not sure if it made a difference, but this time I used the CLI (`railway domain staging.app.example.com`) instead of the browser.
It took less than 1 minute after adding the CNAME.
My question above remains, though 
9 months ago
Hello!
We're acknowledging your issue and attaching a ticket to this thread.
We don't have an ETA for it, but, our engineering team will take a look and you will be updated as we update the ticket.
Please reply to this thread if you have any questions!
9 months ago
Don't disagree and thanks for bringing it up. We'll roll out a change for this next week, but the TL:DR is it tries way too quickly and then gives up.
We're not accounting for real world scenarios where users go update DNS (let alone it's propagation)
Apologies and you should see this get better next week when we rollout the changes
Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway • 9 months ago
9 months ago
Thanks for the honest feedback! I can’t wait to see what the next release has in store for us! 
Status changed to Awaiting Railway Response Railway • 9 months ago
Status changed to Awaiting User Response chandrika • 9 months ago
9 months ago
Okay, you're in luck, Jake just shipped a PR that introduces intelligent backoffs on the domain experience. You shouldn't run into this again.
8 months ago
Great, thanks for the update! And thanks for the PR, Jake.
I'll let you know if I encounter any problems with custom domains again.
Status changed to Awaiting Railway Response Railway • 8 months ago
Status changed to Solved oleg • 8 months ago