Skip to main content
Sign In
Platforms

Railway Deployment

Railway provides a simple platform for deploying Rivet Engine with automatic scaling and managed infrastructure.

Video Tutorial

PostgreSQL is the recommended backend for multi-node self-hosted deployments today, but it remains experimental. For a production-ready single-node Rivet deployment, use the file system backend (RocksDB-based). Enterprise teams can contact enterprise support about FoundationDB for the most scalable production-ready deployment.

Quick Deploy

Choose the template that best fits your needs:

Rivet TemplateRivet Starter
Deploy on RailwayDeploy Rivet Starter
Blank template to start freshComplete example with chat app
- Rivet Engine- Pre-configured Rivet Engine
- PostgreSQL database- Example chat application with Actors
- Basic configuration- PostgreSQL database
- Manual setup required- Rivet Inspector for debugging
- Ready to run immediately

You can also use the Rivet Railway template as a starting point for your application.

After deploying either template, you can find the RIVET__AUTH__ADMIN_TOKEN under the Variables tab in the Railway dashboard. This token is required to access the Rivet Inspector.

Manual Deployment

Prerequisites

  1. Railway account
  2. Railway CLI (optional)

Step 1: Create New Project

# Using Railway CLI
railway init

# Or create via dashboard
# https://railway.app/new

Step 2: Add Services

Deploy PostgreSQL Database

  1. Click “New Service” → “Database” → “PostgreSQL”
  2. Railway automatically provisions and configures PostgreSQL
  3. Note the connection string from the service variables

Deploy Rivet Engine

  1. Click “New Service” → “Docker Image”
  2. Set image: rivetdev/engine:latest
  3. Configure environment variables:
    • RIVET__POSTGRES__URL=${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}
  4. Configure graceful shutdown (see Graceful Shutdown below)

Step 3: Deploy Your Application

Follow the Railway Quick Start guide to deploy your repository:

  1. Connect your GitHub account to Railway
  2. Select your repository containing your Rivet application
  3. Railway will automatically detect and deploy your application
  4. Configure environment variables for your application:
    • RIVET_ENDPOINT=${{Rivet.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}} - Points to the Rivet Engine service’s private domain

Graceful Shutdown

By default, Railway kills the old deploy 0 seconds after sending SIGTERM (see Railway’s docs), so in-flight requests are dropped and state flushes can be interrupted on every deploy. Rivet ships with a SIGTERM handler that drains cleanly, but it only gets to run if Railway is configured to give it time.

Configure the following under Settings → Deploy on your service:

Set draining seconds in the dashboard, via drainingSeconds in config-as-code, or via the RAILWAY_DEPLOYMENT_DRAINING_SECONDS service variable. A reasonable value is 60 seconds.

If your start command is a wrapper process (for example npm start, yarn start, pnpm start, or a shell script), the wrapper becomes PID 1 and swallows the signal — your app never drains and Railway force-kills it at the end of the window.

  • Invoke your binary directly as the start command (for example node dist/index.js, not npm start).
  • Or run dumb-init / tini as PID 1 in your Dockerfile so signals forward to your process.

Next Steps

Edit this page