---
title: "Referrals, Railway Buildpacks Alpha, and Community Updates"
date: 2021-08-27T14:00:00.000-07:00
number: 0044
url: https://railway.com/changelog/2021-08-27
---

# Referrals, Railway Buildpacks Alpha, and Community Updates

## Referrals

You [asked for it](https://feedback.railway.app/feature-requests/p/referral-links) and we delivered! This week, we're adding referrals to Railway. You can find your referral code under the referrals section in your account page.

Any user who signs up on Railway using your referral code receives **$5** in credit on sign up and whenever they pay their first bill, we credit your Railway account with **$5** as well!

Additionally, you can also add your referral code to the Railway button, This way, any user who uses that button to deploy on Railway and doesn't already have an account, counts towards your referrals!

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## Experimental Buildpacks

Railway uses [Cloudnative buildpacks](https://buildpacks.io/) to automatically build your source code and prepare it to be deployed on our cluster. By default, we've always used the [heroku:18](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-18-stack) builder which has worked great so far, but doesn't offer us much in terms of flexibility or configurability.

This is why we've been experimenting with a custom [Railway builder](https://github.com/railwayapp/railway-builder) and group of associated buildpacks that are based off the amazing [Paketo buildpacks](https://paketo.io/). Paketo buildpacks are much more configurable and maintainable on our end, which means we will be able to support more languages and offer better defaults out of the box. For example, our experimental builder has much better support for NodeJS monorepos and projects that use Yarn.

Our new builder is still under active development and not ready 100% ready for all users. However, you can still test it out by enabling the "Experiment Builder" in your projects deployment settings. If you do try it out we would love to hear about any feedback [on our Discord](https://discord.gg/railway)!

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## Community Updates

Our commitment to fostering a wholesome community continues. 

Every request posted in the #railway-help channel will be auto-threaded to keep things nice and clean. There is also a nifty `!help` command to spin up a help thread in other channels as well.

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We also added new roles for users in return for participation on the server. There has never been a better time to be active on the Discord.

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## Various fixes and improvements

- Show build type in build logs
- FAQ styling improvements
- We no longer allow you to set invalid column types in MySQL