Railway•4mo ago

How to use railway with monorepo?

I created a new project and essentially my server code is not at the top level, and instead is one directory down. How do I configure this with railway?

104 Replies

Percy•4mo ago

Project ID: N/A

coltonidle•4mo ago

N/A

Brody•4mo ago

https://docs.railway.app/guides/build-configuration#set-the-root-directory

coltonidle•4mo ago

should have known there was going to be a setting for this. but in my defense... i did try to search for it and i got no hits. but of course i try now and its there in settings. 🤦‍♂️ thanks Brody! I wonder if i have to move my custom nixpack.toml into the new root folder... hmmmm

Brody•4mo ago

you would likely have the nixpacks.toml in the subfolder and then set the location to it with the NIXPACKS_CONFIG_FILE variable

coltonidle•4mo ago

thanks. just moved it to the subfolder, so I will give that a shot. still find it weird that variables cant be in version control (like PORT 8080)

Brody•4mo ago

wdym version control? like github?

coltonidle•4mo ago

yeah

Brody•4mo ago

its a variable that controls the platform, so it needs to be set on the platform itself but side node, there would be no need for you to set a PORT variable yourself as long as your app listens on the automatically generated PORT variable

coltonidle•4mo ago

oh hmmm. i wonder if i can do that on ktor. i guess the auto generated port variable is set as an env variable?

Brody•4mo ago

yep it would be an environment variable, and yes you can do it with ktor, remove the PORT variable you set, now railway will randomly assign one behind the scenes, now all your app has to do is read the PORT environment variable and listen on it

coltonidle•4mo ago

very cool. thanks for teaching. cant seem to get railway to use my /server directory. lmao

coltonidle•4mo ago

Brody•4mo ago

what makes you think that?

coltonidle•4mo ago

Brody•4mo ago

haha okay well more specifically?

coltonidle•4mo ago

Error: Failed to read Nixpacks config file nixpacks.toml Caused by: 0: Error reading nixpacks.toml 1: No such file or directory (os error 2)

Brody•4mo ago

what did you set that NIXPACKS_CONFIG_FILE to?

coltonidle•4mo ago

Brody•4mo ago

its blue have you not deployed the changes?

coltonidle•4mo ago

I did, I was just changing things back and forth again Tried /server /server/nixpacks.toml /nixpacks.toml

Brody•4mo ago

second option seems like the best but without seeing your project structure i dont know for sure oh maybe you dont need to set that variable if the root directory is set, try omitting it

coltonidle•4mo ago

this is my /server

coltonidle•4mo ago

Nope. same issue even if i remove the env variable. already tried that, and just tried again Error: Failed to read Nixpacks config file nixpacks.toml Caused by: 0: Error reading nixpacks.toml 1: No such file or directory (os error 2)

Brody•4mo ago

you completely removed the NIXPACKS_CONFIG_FILE variable from your service? but those logs would indicate that its still set

coltonidle•4mo ago

you know what. i bet you i know the issue i dont think i have a "true" monorepo the root project is still a gradle project. so i probably actually dont want to change root, but I instead might want to move the nixpacks.toml.

Brody•4mo ago

what two apps are in this repo?

coltonidle•4mo ago

i used kmp.jetbrains.com to generate the project and so i have two mobile apps (ios and android) and a server directory (ktor)

Brody•4mo ago

interesting

coltonidle•4mo ago

but yeah. its not a completely isolated project i.e. isolated monorepo vs shared monorepo

coltonidle•4mo ago

https://docs.railway.app/guides/monorepo#deploying-an-isolated-monorepo

Railway Docs

Deploying a Monorepo | Railway Docs

Documentation for Railway

coltonidle•4mo ago

https://docs.railway.app/guides/monorepo#deploying-a-shared-monorepo

Railway Docs

Deploying a Monorepo | Railway Docs

Documentation for Railway

Brody•4mo ago

yeah this is more like a shared monorepo, and in that case you liking don't want to set a root directory

coltonidle•4mo ago

doesn't seem like its picking up my nixpacks.toml even though its in the root of the project. do i need to set a variable even if its in the root? yeah. if i just set the build command directly in the railway dashboard then things build properly. not sure why it doesn't like my nixpacks.toml

Brody•4mo ago

very odd

coltonidle•4mo ago

ill figure it out. im gettin good at this stuff. 🙂 rubberducking... i think my nixpacks.toml file is wrong

[build]
buildCommand = './gradlew -p server clean build -x check -x test'

[deploy]
startCommand = 'java $JAVA_OPTS -jar server/build/libs/*-all.jar'

[build]
buildCommand = './gradlew -p server clean build -x check -x test'

[deploy]
startCommand = 'java $JAVA_OPTS -jar server/build/libs/*-all.jar'

Brody•4mo ago

very wrong did gpt write that for you

coltonidle•4mo ago

no. i used the docs https://docs.railway.app/reference/config-as-code#nixpacks-config-path

Brody•4mo ago

[phases.build]
cmds = ['./gradlew -p server clean build -x check -x test']

[start]
cmd = ['java $JAVA_OPTS -jar server/build/libs/*-all.jar']

[phases.build]
cmds = ['./gradlew -p server clean build -x check -x test']

[start]
cmd = ['java $JAVA_OPTS -jar server/build/libs/*-all.jar']

thats for a railway.toml

coltonidle•4mo ago

bah. wheres the nixpacks docs. lmaooo

Brody•4mo ago

we can pivot to a railway.toml if thats what you'd like to do? https://nixpacks.com/docs/configuration/file

coltonidle•4mo ago

i guess i dont really care. i was just using what i learned in the last thread (from aleks)

Brody•4mo ago

maybe a railway.json would even be best? since it has schema validation

{
    "$schema": "https://schema.up.railway.app/railway.schema.json",
    "build": {
        "builder": "NIXPACKS",
        "buildCommand": "./gradlew -p server clean build -x check -x test"
    },
    "deploy": {
        "startCommand": "java $JAVA_OPTS -jar server/build/libs/*-all.jar"
    }
}

{
    "$schema": "https://schema.up.railway.app/railway.schema.json",
    "build": {
        "builder": "NIXPACKS",
        "buildCommand": "./gradlew -p server clean build -x check -x test"
    },
    "deploy": {
        "startCommand": "java $JAVA_OPTS -jar server/build/libs/*-all.jar"
    }
}

coltonidle•4mo ago

interesting. how does it do schema validation? on the railway side? or can i somehow validate locally? but anyway. yeah. i did what you said and it worked

Brody•4mo ago

the $schema value links to the schema file and then vscode tells you if you did something very wrong

coltonidle•4mo ago

maybe railway.json will be a project for tomorrow. dont use vscode (using jetbrains fleet) lol.

Brody•4mo ago

i cant see why it wouldnt do json validation as well

coltonidle•4mo ago

gotta shut the laptop for a bit. but. let me know if you have any pref between doing a railway.json/toml vs a nixpacks.toml i am a big fan of config as code. so i want to do that where possible.

Brody•4mo ago

i like railway.json by far, since you can embed a nixpacks.toml file into it and have schema validation!

Duchess•4mo ago

New reply sent from Help Station thread:

At the same time, though, your nixpacks settings in railway.json will only be respected by Railway's nixpacks, so local nixpacks builds won't respect those settings. If that's not a concern, though, JSON schema validation is always great.

You're seeing this because this thread has been automatically linked to the Help Station thread.

coltonidle•4mo ago

Alright. Going to try to convert to railway.json i guess if railway.json exists, it'll just use it?

Brody•4mo ago

correct

coltonidle•4mo ago

because i just converted the file and everything seems to be building fine cool

Brody•4mo ago

lets see the file you came up with

coltonidle•4mo ago

should i also just add the rest of this stuff?

coltonidle•4mo ago

I just plugged in the file you passed over 🥰

{
    "$schema": "https://schema.up.railway.app/railway.schema.json",
    "build": {
        "builder": "NIXPACKS",
        "buildCommand": "./gradlew -p server clean build -x check -x test"
    },
    "deploy": {
        "startCommand": "java $JAVA_OPTS -jar server/build/libs/*-all.jar"
    }
}

{
    "$schema": "https://schema.up.railway.app/railway.schema.json",
    "build": {
        "builder": "NIXPACKS",
        "buildCommand": "./gradlew -p server clean build -x check -x test"
    },
    "deploy": {
        "startCommand": "java $JAVA_OPTS -jar server/build/libs/*-all.jar"
    }
}

Brody•4mo ago

its not needed, unless you want to set that stuff from your railway.json file

coltonidle•4mo ago

sent some trains over. 💸 cheers buddy

Brody•4mo ago

ah thanks ❤️

coltonidle•4mo ago

im curious now about this json validation thing. ive never heard of that in my life. lol not sure if jetbrains fleet is doing any sort of validation for me lol

Brody•4mo ago

hey, my first introduction to it was when i edited my first railway.json too! i can't imagine fleet not doing the schema validation

coltonidle•4mo ago

i guess thats validation in action?

Brody•4mo ago

yeah thats it, its not gonna help you make sure what you do is going to do what you want, but it will let you know if what youre doing is not valid

coltonidle•4mo ago

awesome. gonna try the port number thing and get some sleep. hopefully its easy peasy

coltonidle•4mo ago

https://docs.railway.app/reference/variables#railway-provided-variables Assuming I'm after RAILWAY_TCP_APPLICATION_PORT

Railway Docs

Variables | Railway Docs

Documentation for Railway

coltonidle•4mo ago

even though the docs for that seem wrong? i think its a copy pasta issue

Brody•4mo ago

nope, just PORT

coltonidle•4mo ago

hm. howd you find that out? lol. sorry i try to find docs, but did i miss something here?

Brody•4mo ago

mainly covered here https://docs.railway.app/guides/fixing-common-errors and here https://docs.railway.app/guides/public-networking#port-variable

coltonidle•4mo ago

thanks. for whatever reason... it seems like RAILWAY_TCP_APPLICATION_PORT also worked? unless it actually just defaulted to 8080 and that worked. going to switch to plain ol "PORT" now... 🤞 oooh. very interesting. PORT didn't work...

Brody•4mo ago

do you have a tcp proxy on your service? if you do, you shouldn't

coltonidle•4mo ago

i dont believe so actually wait. i think it did work but i had downtime. which caused me to think it didn't work.

Brody•4mo ago

https://github.com/shank03/kotlin-spring-mvn/blob/main/src/main/resources/application.properties#L1

coltonidle•4mo ago

ill refer back to the convo we had about health check or w/e

Brody•4mo ago

i think this is close enough to what you're running? a health check and RAILWAY_DEPLOYMENT_OVERLAP_SECONDS set to 35 is what the team (and me) are currently recommending until railway rolls out the new and faster http proxy

coltonidle•4mo ago

okay. so RAILWAY_TCP_APPLICATION_PORT doesn't actually work. it was because if i can't find the env variable defined, then it chooses 8080 and somehow using 8080 as a default works now. or actually. nope.

Brody•4mo ago

so the goal here would be to not have a PORT variable defined on your service

coltonidle•4mo ago

looks like its just a nice long delay again that was misleading me. I'm just doing this

fun main() {
    val serverPort: String =
        try {
            System.getenv("BLAH")
        } catch (e: Exception) {
            "8080"
        }

    embeddedServer(Netty, port = serverPort.toInt(), host = "0.0.0.0", module = Application::module)
        .start(wait = true)
}

fun main() {
    val serverPort: String =
        try {
            System.getenv("BLAH")
        } catch (e: Exception) {
            "8080"
        }

    embeddedServer(Netty, port = serverPort.toInt(), host = "0.0.0.0", module = Application::module)
        .start(wait = true)
}

Brody•4mo ago

BLAH?

coltonidle•4mo ago

so basically. before I just had val serverPort: String = "8080" BLAH is just me trying to break stuff and seeing if it works

Brody•4mo ago

gotcha

coltonidle•4mo ago

which i thought it did. but it was the previoius instance still working

Brody•4mo ago

so just to check, does your railway service have a PORT service variable set?

coltonidle•4mo ago

nope variables are empty at the moment switching back over to val serverPort: String = try { System.getenv("PORT") } catch (e: Exception) { "8080" }

Brody•4mo ago

good

coltonidle•4mo ago

and will see if that works cool. yep that works. no PORT variable declaration needed. noice. another thing that can be tucked away as code. thanks!

coltonidle•4mo ago

i do wonder why my ktor server somehow says it starts up at 55:44, but can't actually handle requests until about 30 seconds later. at 56:19

Brody•4mo ago

yeah its super handy how railway does that the switch over time

coltonidle•4mo ago

gotcha. so its not my server code initialization actually taking 30 seconds. lol

Brody•4mo ago

nope im sure that time will go down when railway rolls out their new http server

coltonidle•4mo ago

cool cool. thats fine. nice to at least know that its out of my control. running a few more sanity checks with healthcheck endpoint and stuff, but i think im all set 🤞

Brody•4mo ago

great!

coltonidle•4mo ago

oh yahhh. works great. awesome. so many great little tips learned today. appreciate it. im essentially getting to a point where i can have a small template for all future ktor projects. love to see it.

Brody•4mo ago

happy i could help

coltonidle•4mo ago

1/1 replicas never became healthy! Healthcheck failed!

never been so happy to see a failure lol

Brody•4mo ago

lol i assume you planned that

coltonidle•4mo ago

yep System.getenv("BLAH") just making sure the healthcheck worked as expected when it defaulted to 8080 and couldn't actually startup thanks again. night 💤

Brody•4mo ago

no problem!

coltonidle•4mo ago

heh. i was able to see the railway 404 page or w/e even with the healthcheck and timeout of 500. no storage or db attached to this server.

Attempt #1 failed with service unavailable. Continuing to retry for 4m59s [1/1] Healthcheck succeeded!

so for a split second my server went down. you think im missing anything else here? (i know the last time this happened we narrowed it down to the fact that i had some storage attached). but none of that this time.

Brody•4mo ago

RAILWAY_DEPLOYMENT_OVERLAP_SECONDS set to 35 should do the trick

coltonidle•4mo ago

aha. so thats diff from "Healthcheck Timeout" yep. that seemed to do the trick. couldn't repro the railway 404 page. excellent. ill make sure to add that to my default template as well (see, thats something id love to add to railway.json) lol. sat there again and just tried cmd + r to refresh over and over and over and i was able to see the downtime page for a split second.

Brody•4mo ago

unfortunately that looks like the best we can do with the current http proxy

coltonidle•4mo ago

bumped to RAILWAY_DEPLOYMENT_OVERLAPSECONDS to 60. and couldn't repro. ¯_(ツ)/¯ might do a few more sanity checks tomorrow. sleep for real this time. lmao

Brody•4mo ago

sounds good!

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How to use railway with monorepo?