G1Joshi 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.