Railway Deploy Skill

Deploy Node.js services to Railway with auto-deploy from GitHub.

When to Use

• Always-on backend services
• APIs and proxies
• Cron jobs and workers
• Anything that needs to run 24/7

Quick Deploy

1. Create railway.toml

[build]
builder = "nixpacks"

[deploy]
startCommand = "node index.js"
healthcheckPath = "/"
healthcheckTimeout = 100
restartPolicyType = "ON_FAILURE"
restartPolicyMaxRetries = 3

2. Set Up package.json

{
  "name": "my-service",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.18.0"
  }
}

3. Add Health Check

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.json({ status: 'ok', version: '1.0.0' });
});

4. Connect GitHub

1. Go to railway.app
2. New Project → Deploy from GitHub
3. Select repo
4. Railway auto-detects Node.js and deploys

Environment Variables

Set in Railway dashboard or CLI:

railway variables set API_KEY=xxx
railway variables set DATABASE_URL=xxx

Access in code:

const API_KEY = process.env.API_KEY;

Custom Domain

1. Go to Settings → Domains
2. Add custom domain
3. Update DNS with provided CNAME

Auto-Deploy

Railway auto-deploys on every push to the connected branch (usually main).

To deploy manually:

railway up

Logs

View in dashboard or:

railway logs

Pricing

• $5/month gives 500 hours + $5 usage
• Hobby tier is usually enough for small services
• Pay for what you use (CPU/RAM/bandwidth)

Best Practices

1. Always add health check - Railway uses it for deployments
2. Use environment variables - never commit secrets
3. Add error handling - unhandled errors = crash = restart
4. Log important events - helps with debugging
5. Set restart policy - auto-recover from crashes