Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up Railway

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• Free tier eliminated in August 2023 caused a mass migration to Render, Fly.io, and Fly's competitors. Users complained loudly on Hacker News; Railway kept the $5 credit on Hobby as partial compensation [source: railway.com/changelog and HN thread on pricing change].
• Usage-based billing means an app with a memory leak or a runaway process can rack up an unexpected bill. Set spending limits on the account.
• Rebuild times can be slow (5-10 minutes for medium apps); build caching helps but is not perfect.
• Postgres backups on Hobby tier are limited; production databases should use scheduled dumps to external storage.
• Railway's private networking (services talking to each other privately) is a Pro tier feature.

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your Railway account

   Sign up at the link below. Free tier available - no card required. Use your business email so you can invite teammates later.

   Open Railway signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If Railway pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire Railway into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: GitHub (native, deploy on push), GitLab, Docker Hub, Discord (build notifications), Slack, custom domains with automatic TLS (via Let's Encrypt), Terraform provider, CLI (railway CLI), API for programmatic control. Templates gallery for one-click deploys of common stacks.. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how Railway deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in Railway - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   Recommend Railway for solo developers and small teams shipping web apps, APIs, or full-stack services. Recommend for the developer who wants Heroku's ergonomics with modern pricing. Recommend Fly.io when multi-region matters. Recommend Vercel or Netlify for frontend-heavy Next.js. Recommend Hetzner for cost-conscious teams comfortable with more ops work.