Railway Deploy

Deploy to Railway

Description

Deploy applications and backends to Railway. Handles long-running processes, WebSockets, cron jobs, and LLM API calls with no timeout limits.

Triggers

• railway
• deploy to railway
• deploy backend
• deploy api
• deploy server
• deploy websocket
• deploy streaming
• long running deploy

Instructions

When to Use Railway

Railway is the right choice for:

• APIs that call LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) — responses take > 10s
• Streaming / Server-Sent Events / WebSocket applications
• Background workers, cron jobs, job queues (BullMQ, pg-boss)
• Pure API backends (no frontend)
• Any app that needs persistent server processes
• When in doubt — Railway has no timeout limits

Deploy Workflow

1. Build locally first — always run npm run build (or equivalent) before deploying. Fix all build errors locally.

2. Create database if needed — if the project needs persistence, call create_database with a project name. It returns url, anon_key, service_role_key, and db_url automatically. Never ask the user for Supabase keys — they are auto-generated.

3. Deploy using the deploy_website tool:

   deploy_website(
     project_path="/path/to/project",
     provider="railway",
     name="my-api",              # optional
     env_vars={                  # from create_database result + any other vars
       "DATABASE_URL": db_url,
       "SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY": service_role_key,
       "OPENAI_API_KEY": "...",  # or any other env vars the app needs
     }
   )
   

4. Verify — check the returned URL or use deployment_status to confirm.

Token Setup

The deploy_website tool reads the Railway token from the vault automatically. If not set, it will tell the user what to do:

vault_set key=railway_token value=YOUR_TOKEN

Get the token at: railway.com → Account Settings → Tokens → Create Token.

The Railway CLI must be installed: npm install -g @railway/cli

How It Works Under the Hood

The deploy_website tool runs:

# Set env vars
RAILWAY_TOKEN=$TOKEN railway variables set KEY1=VAL1 KEY2=VAL2

# Deploy (detached — returns immediately)
RAILWAY_TOKEN=$TOKEN railway up --detach

# Get the public URL
RAILWAY_TOKEN=$TOKEN railway domain

Railway Free Tier

• $5/month credit (no credit card needed to start)
• No timeout limits on server processes
• Persistent processes (keeps running after deploy)
• Custom domains supported
• Automatic HTTPS

Project Types That Need Railway

Anti-Patterns

• Don't hardcode API keys in source — use env_vars parameter.
• Don't deploy without building locally — catch errors before deploying.
• Don't ask the user for Supabase anon/service keys — create_database returns them automatically.
• Don't use Railway for simple static sites — Vercel is free and faster for static content with global CDN.

Verify

• The deploy command was actually run and the build/log output (or deploy URL) is captured
• The deployed URL was opened and returned a 2xx; key routes were sampled, not just the index
• Environment variables required by the app are present in the target environment; missing-var failures were ruled out
• A rollback plan (previous deployment ID, git SHA, or one-line revert command) is documented before promoting to production
• Health/observability check (logs, error tracker, status page) was inspected post-deploy; baseline error rate is recorded
• DNS / domain / SSL configuration was confirmed, not assumed to carry over from previous deploys