Cron Job Monitoring for Railway

Railway's cron jobs run your services on a schedule. Railway doesn't alert you when they fail or stop running. DeadManCheck does — in two minutes of setup.

How cron jobs work on Railway

Railway cron jobs start a service on a cron schedule, run it to completion, then stop it. The minimum interval is 5 minutes. There's no built-in alerting when a job fails or stops running — Railway logs the run, but it won't page you.

That means a Railway cron job that crashes, hangs, or silently processes nothing will go unnoticed until you happen to check the logs.

What can go wrong on Railway

Service fails to start — misconfigured environment variable, missing dependency, Railway deploy issue. Job scheduled, never runs.
Job exits non-zero — Railway logs the failure but sends no alert. You find out when someone notices missing data.
Job exits 0 but does nothing — database connection string changed, API token expired. Script runs, returns success, processes nothing.
Job takes much longer than usual — data volume grew, downstream API is slow. Duration spikes silently.

Integrating DeadManCheck with Railway

Create a monitor at deadmancheck.io, set the interval to match your Railway cron schedule, and add the ping to your service.

For a Python service

import requests, os

TOKEN = os.environ["DEADMANCHECK_TOKEN"]
BASE = f"https://deadmancheck.io/ping/{TOKEN}"

def main():
    requests.get(f"{BASE}/start", timeout=5)
    try:
        count = run_job()
        requests.get(BASE, params={"count": count}, timeout=5)
    except Exception:
        requests.get(f"{BASE}/fail", timeout=5)
        raise

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

For a bash/shell service

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

BASE="https://deadmancheck.io/ping/${DEADMANCHECK_TOKEN}"

curl -fsS "${BASE}/start" > /dev/null
trap 'curl -fsS "${BASE}/fail" > /dev/null' ERR

/app/run-export.sh

curl -fsS "${BASE}" > /dev/null

Setting the environment variable on Railway

Add DEADMANCHECK_TOKEN to your Railway service's environment variables: Railway dashboard → your service → Variables → Add variable.

Output assertions for Railway jobs

Railway's cron only knows whether your service exited 0 or non-zero. It has no concept of "this job ran but processed nothing."

Include a count in your DeadManCheck ping and configure an assertion: "alert if count is 0". Now your Railway backup job that silently exports nothing triggers an alert — even though Railway marks it as successful. Learn more about output assertions →

Free for 5 monitors. $12/mo for 100.