Recently, due to the news with Heroku for shutting down their Free Plan, we have all been extensively looking for alternatives. Railway is such one of them I would recommend.

What is Railway???

Railway is a deployment platform where you can provision infrastructure, develop with that infrastructure locally, and then deploy to the cloud.

Source : Railway

Developing Locally

So far Railway spun up a Postgres instance and a web server providing all the needed variables on deploy. We will connect to that very same Postgres instance locally to help us develop our app.

Lets begin by cloning the repo you created on your machine.

Install and Link the CLI

The Railway CLI to connects your code to your infrastructure.

Install with Brew, NPM, or Scoop:

brew install railwayapp/railway/railway

or

npm i -g @railway/cli

Log in to your account by running the login command.

railway login

Then, when you are in your project's directory, link your repo to the template project with the following command.

railway link

Features

Source : TechCrunch

1. Autoscaling: Based on the load, Railway will automatically scale the application to meet the user demands. Railway bills only for computes on the platform.

2. Metrics: Railways offers a wide range of real-time metrics to debug issues instantaneously. The platform sends queries for negative trends and shows developers exactly what is wrong so that they can troubleshoot the issues when required.

3. Apps run indefinitely: Compared to Heroku, where your app shuts down when it does not receive any input for over 30 mins, deployments on Railway run indefinitely. You can either run your app using Procfile or deploy a Docker file.

Happy Coding!!!

Being PaaS implementations, Heroku and Railway both bring similar features and offer a suite of benefits like cost efficiency, improved speed to market, etc.

Heroku was one of the first to bring container-based cloud computing to the mainstream market and is widely popular.

So, What are you waiting for? Sign Up Today

Thank You for reading till here. Meanwhile you can check out my other blog posts and visit my Github.