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Database Implementation Plan (Railway)

The Problem

You currently have alembic_version and users because those are managed by the Auth service (which uses SQLAlchemy and Alembic migrations, relying on the DATABASE_URL Railway provides).

The missing tables belong to the Notification service:

  • subscribers
  • subscriber_sites
  • sent_log

Why are they missing on Railway?

  1. The Notification service uses its own connection variables (NOTIFICATION_PG_HOST, NOTIFICATION_PG_PORT, etc.) instead of the standard DATABASE_URL that Railway provides.
  2. In services/notification/config.py, if you don't have HelloSMS or SMTP2GO credentials set up, it activates NOTIFICATION_MOCK_MODE.
  3. When NOTIFICATION_MOCK_MODE is active, the database connection is entirely skipped, and subscriptions are saved in server memory (which resets every time Railway deploys or goes to sleep).

Proposed Changes

To fix this so it works perfectly on Railway, we need to:

  1. Use DATABASE_URL: Update the notification database logic to use the same connection string (DATABASE_URL) that the rest of the application uses.
  2. Decouple DB from Mock Mode: Ensure that the database always connects to PostgreSQL if the URL is provided, even if you are using Mock Mode for sending SMS/emails. This ensures subscriptions are permanently saved even if you don't have real SMS credentials configured.
  3. Auto-creation: Ensure the init_db() function runs successfully on Railway and auto-creates the tables.

1. Update services/notification/config.py

We will fetch DATABASE_URL to be used by the notification DB.

[MODIFY] config.py

Add DATABASE_URL parsing alongside the existing Postgres variables.

2. Update services/notification/db.py

We will change _connect() to use DATABASE_URL if it's available, and separate _use_mock_storage so it only activates if DATABASE_URL is entirely missing or the connection fails.

[MODIFY] db.py

Change the logic so that the database is always initialized when the server starts if there is a DATABASE_URL.

What you need to do on Railway

Once we make these code changes and push them to Railway:

  1. Railway already injects a DATABASE_URL environment variable automatically if you provisioned a PostgreSQL database.
  2. When the app starts, it will see DATABASE_URL, connect to PostgreSQL, and run CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS for the three missing notification tables.
  3. Your subscribers will now be saved permanently in the database!

User Review Required

Does this approach sound good? If you approve, I will write the code to fix config.py and db.py to seamlessly use the Railway database connection.