TL;DR - Railway doesn’t support git submodules yet. They probably will at some point - here’s the feature request. In the meantime, here’s a quick workaround to get it working / deploying.
Use Github Workflow
You can deploy projects to railway.app directly from github, but they do not support git submodules yet. So your repo gets cloned as usual and railway attempts to build/deploy. However, the submodules are not included, and the build will fail. Seems like they will eventually add this feature, but until then here’s the workaround I used. The idea is to use a Github Workflow to:
- Clone your repo (including submodules)
- Remove the submodule from the index / remove the .gitmodules file
- Still keeping the actual code from the submodule
- Switch to a new branch, add the submodule code back as a regular directory
- Commit and push the new branch to github
- Deploy the new branch to railway
This can be set up using to trigger on a push to the main branch, and then just
set up railway to deploy from the new branch. In my case I called the new branch
deploy.
Here’s the workflow that I used:
name: "Pull submodule / Push to deploy branch"
on:
push:
branches:
- main
jobs:
pull_submodule_and_deploy:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
with:
submodules: true
- name: Update commit author
run: |
git config user.name 'github-actions[bot]'
git config user.email 'github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com'
- name: Push to deploy branch
run: |
git checkout -b deploy
git rm --cached api/ChatGPTBot # here api/ChatGPTBot is a submodule
git rm .gitmodules
rm -rf api/ChatGPTBot/.git
git add api/ChatGPTBot
git commit -m "Checkout repo + submodule, add all and commit"
git push origin deploy -f
And that’s it! That’s one simple somewhat hacky workaround to get railway to run your project with submodules.