Railway

Railway is a modern PaaS that offers “Infrastructure from Code”. It introspects your repo and deploys it. Can also deploy Databases (Postgres, Redis, Mongo).

When to Use

• Heroku Alternative: Cheaper and more modern interface than Heroku.
• Databases: Spining up a private network with a Service and a Redis/Postgres DB is 1 click.
• Monorepos: Excellent support for building multiple services (frontend, backend, worker) from one repo.

Quick Start (CLI)

railway login
railway init
railway up

Core Concepts

Services

Apps or Databases.

Canvas

A visual graph of your infrastructure showing usage and relationships.

Config as Code

railway.toml allows you to define build commands and deploy health checks.

Best Practices (2025)

Do:

• Use Private Networking: Services communicate over private IP (IPv6). Explicitly expose only what needs public access.
• Use Templates: One-click deploy “PostHog”, “Metabase”, “Cronicle”.
• Use Priority Boarding: For critical production apps, upgrade the plan to ensure capacity.

Don’t:

• Don’t rely on ephemeral disk: Just like Heroku, filesystem is reset on deploy.

References

• Railway Documentation