[fix] Repair incomplete Railway previews [AGE-4023]

[huige66631]

Summary

Repair Railway pull request previews when a transient service-creation failure
would otherwise leave the environment permanently incomplete.

Demo

The mocked Railway CLI test exercises the recovery paths described below.

Context

A transient Railway API error could prevent preview bootstrap from creating a
service, while bootstrap.sh still printed Bootstrap completed. The deploy
then failed with Service 'cron' not found. Re-running only failed jobs could
not repair the preview because the successful bootstrap job did not run again.

Before this change, service creation used:

railway add ... >/dev/null 2>&1 || true

That command hid the error and treated a missing service as a successful setup.

Changes

Bootstrap now reads the linked Railway environment and reconciles the 13
required services before it reports success. It skips services that already
exist. For a missing service, it runs railway add and leaves any error in the
job log.

The final Railway status check decides the result. A failed add can mean that
Railway rejected the request, or that Railway created the service before the
CLI timed out. Bootstrap succeeds only when Railway lists every required
service. Otherwise it fails and names the missing services before it creates
volumes.

When configure.sh sees Service '<name>' not found, it now tells the user to
re-run all jobs. That runs bootstrap again and gives it a chance to repair the
preview.

The design workspace is in
docs/design/railway-preview-bootstrap-recovery/.

Tests / notes

• Ran bash hosting/railway/oss/scripts/tests/test_preview_bootstrap.sh with
  a mocked Railway CLI. It verifies existing services, a failed cron create
  that leaves it absent, a CLI timeout that still creates cron, and the
  configure recovery message.
• Ran bash -n for the changed Bash scripts and git diff --check.
• Added a focused GitHub Actions workflow that installs jq and runs the mock
  test when Railway scripts change.
• The repository's Railway preview CI still needs to run this change with its
  Railway credentials. That is the remaining end-to-end check.

[vercel]

@huige66631 is attempting to deploy a commit to the agenta projects Team on Vercel.

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[github-actions]

✅ Thanks @huige66631! This PR now meets the contribution requirements and has been reopened. A maintainer will review it soon.

[CLAassistant]

All committers have signed the CLA.

[coderabbitai]

📝 Walkthrough

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Bug Fixes

  • Railway preview setup now verifies all required services before reporting success.
  • Existing services are preserved, while missing services are detected and handled safely.
  • Configuration failures involving missing services now provide guidance to rerun all setup jobs.

• Documentation

  • Added design and recovery documentation describing preview setup behavior, troubleshooting, and validation expectations.

• Tests

  • Added automated checks covering successful setup, missing services, delayed service availability, and configuration recovery guidance.

Walkthrough

Railway preview bootstrap now skips existing services, verifies all 13 required services before success or volume creation, and reports recovery guidance for missing services. Mocked CLI scenarios and a targeted GitHub Actions workflow validate the scripts.

Changes

Railway preview recovery

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Recovery design and validation contract docs/design/railway-preview-bootstrap-recovery/*	Documents required-service reconciliation, missing-service recovery guidance, implementation scope, validation scenarios, and current status.
Bootstrap service reconciliation hosting/railway/oss/scripts/bootstrap.sh	Lists existing services, adds only missing services, polls for all expected services, and verifies them before creating volumes or reporting success.
Configuration recovery and automated validation hosting/railway/oss/scripts/configure.sh, hosting/railway/oss/scripts/tests/test_preview_bootstrap.sh, .github/workflows/39-railway-script-tests.yml	Adds missing-service recovery messaging, enables sourcing for tests, covers mocked bootstrap/configuration scenarios, and runs syntax and focused tests in CI.

Estimated code review effort: 4 (Complex) | ~45 minutes

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant Bootstrap
  participant RailwayCLI
  participant RailwayEnvironment
  participant Configure
  Bootstrap->>RailwayCLI: Query service status
  RailwayCLI->>RailwayEnvironment: List services
  RailwayEnvironment-->>Bootstrap: Existing service names
  Bootstrap->>RailwayCLI: Add missing services
  Bootstrap->>RailwayCLI: Verify expected services
  RailwayCLI-->>Bootstrap: Service visibility
  Configure->>RailwayCLI: Set service variables
  RailwayCLI-->>Configure: Missing-service error
  Configure-->>Configure: Print re-run-all-jobs guidance

Loading

Possibly related issues

• Agenta-AI/agenta#5566 — Directly relates to verifying missing Railway services and advising users to rerun all jobs.

Possibly related PRs

• Agenta-AI/agenta#5322 — Both changes address missing-service handling during Railway bootstrap and configuration.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 20.59% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 60.00%.	Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly summarizes the main change: repairing incomplete Railway previews.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description matches the changeset and explains the Railway preview recovery work.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

✨ Finishing Touches 💡 1

🛠️ Fix failing CI checks 💡

• Fix failing CI checks

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests

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[coderabbitai]

Actionable comments posted: 1

🧹 Nitpick comments (2)

hosting/railway/oss/scripts/bootstrap.sh (1)

27-41: 📐 Maintainability & Code Quality | 🔵 Trivial | ⚡ Quick win

Required-service list is duplicated across bootstrap.sh and its test. Both files independently define the same 13-service array; a future change to one without the other lets the mock test pass while no longer reflecting bootstrap's actual reconciliation set.

• hosting/railway/oss/scripts/bootstrap.sh#L27-L41: keep as the canonical EXPECTED_SERVICES definition, but consider making it easy to source (e.g., factor into a small sourced file or emit it via a --list-services flag) so the test can consume it directly.
• hosting/railway/oss/scripts/tests/test_preview_bootstrap.sh#L11-L11: derive this array from bootstrap.sh's canonical list instead of hardcoding a second copy.

.github/workflows/39-railway-script-tests.yml (1)

17-17: 🔒 Security & Privacy | 🔵 Trivial | 💤 Low value

Consider persist-credentials: false on checkout.

Minor defense-in-depth: this job checks out and runs PR-supplied scripts; disabling credential persistence avoids leaving the (already read-only) token in .git/config for the remainder of the job.

Source: Linters/SAST tools

---

ℹ️ Review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: 2e1a2a5f-ed0e-4cfc-b362-880e58207cd6

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 140761d and 2c17220.

⛔ Files ignored due to path filters (1)

• docs/design/railway-preview-bootstrap-recovery/mock-test-output.png is excluded by !**/*.png

📒 Files selected for processing (9)

• .github/workflows/39-railway-script-tests.yml
• docs/design/railway-preview-bootstrap-recovery/README.md
• docs/design/railway-preview-bootstrap-recovery/context.md
• docs/design/railway-preview-bootstrap-recovery/plan.md
• docs/design/railway-preview-bootstrap-recovery/research.md
• docs/design/railway-preview-bootstrap-recovery/status.md
• hosting/railway/oss/scripts/bootstrap.sh
• hosting/railway/oss/scripts/configure.sh
• hosting/railway/oss/scripts/tests/test_preview_bootstrap.sh

[coderabbitai]

🗄️ Data Integrity & Integration | 🟠 Major | ⚡ Quick win

SeaweedFS image pin appears to be out of this fix's declared scope.

context.md's Out Of Scope section states: "Changing service names, images, volumes, or the preview workflow's public inputs." This line pins a new SEAWEEDFS_IMAGE default, which is exactly the kind of change the design doc excludes. Either drop this from the fix (track it separately) or update context.md/plan.md to acknowledge the expanded scope so the design docs stay accurate.

[huige66631]

Thanks for the catch. SEAWEEDFS_IMAGE is pre-existing on main and is unchanged by this PR. This PR only adds service reconciliation and final verification, so the documented scope remains accurate.

[mmabrouk]

Thanks @huige66631 for the investigation and the careful write-up. The problem you identified is real, and your instinct (verify actual Railway state before reporting success) is the right one. We're closing the PR anyway, for three reasons:

1. The branch is based on an older main. (bug) A transient Railway API failure during preview bootstrap leaves the PR environment permanently broken #5566 and fix(railway): restore runner and mount connectivity #5485 landed after you branched, and main now already verifies all 13 services before bootstrap reports success and already prints the "re-run all jobs" guidance. Because this diff rewrites both scripts wholesale, merging it would revert those fixes, plus the store-credential and runner-host fixes that shipped with them.
2. The committed files were converted to CRLF line endings and lost their executable bits, so as committed the scripts fail bash -n and can't be invoked directly. Probably an editor or git autocrlf setting on your side; worth checking before your next PR.
3. We're changing direction on this pipeline. Instead of creating services one by one per preview (and patching each failure mode of that approach), we're moving to Railway's environment duplication, which clones a fully configured template environment in one call. That removes the service-creation code this PR hardens.

The mocked Railway CLI test harness was a genuinely good idea and we may borrow the pattern. Thanks again for contributing.