---
title: "Metro Transition, Empty Services, and Shiny Toasts"
date: 2022-02-04T14:00:00.000+00:00
number: 0067
url: https://railway.com/changelog/2022-02-04
---

# Metro Transition, Empty Services, and Shiny Toasts

Happy Friday everyone! The team always looks forward to publishing the changelog and this week especially so. We got a number of tasty improvements even though we are an infrastructure software company and not a bakery. 

## Metro Transition

Metro, the new project experience for Railway reaches a new milestone after we opened up the experience for everyone. Now you can permanently use Metro as the preferred UI on your projects.

There is now a button that will allow you to “Convert Project to Metro project” along with an information modal that entails what comes with the transition.

Migrating your project to Metro is a one-way operation. Which means you can not switch back to the previous interface. We will give users the chance to Opt-In to Metro with a flexible timeframe depending on user feedback. Keep in mind there are some differences on how the new UI behaves.

- `railway up` within a project will prompt you which service you want to deploy to
- Variables and metrics are scoped at the service level
- Environments are scoped at the project level
- New environments will deploy replicas of all the services within a project
  - If there were 3 services in Production, making a Development environment will spin up 3 additional services scoped to the Developer environment

With the exception to the CLI behavior, all projects should expect to run the same with no downtime.

We will continue to exercise caution as the change affects the layout of your projects. Furthermore, we will ensure that we maintain a gradual and predictable pace of the transition. The next milestone will have all new projects use Metro as the default experience in the coming weeks along with the release of docs about Metro. As always, we will keep everyone up to date about our plans with the final transition being completed by end of the month. 

## Empty Services

The introduction of Metro has modified how Railway performs CLI operations. Before, it was only possible to have a repo and a plugin. However, you may want an empty service to store variables as well as run `railway up` to.

[Video: Untitled]

## Performance Improvements

Greg spent this week making a bunch of lines go down in the right direction. Before you ask, we mean response times. We have cut the average dashboard query time by more than half meaning that you can run, not walk to your projects.

You also must be wondering why Railway had planned maintenance- well, we also performed a database migration that further decreased latency of the dashboard. It went super smoothly and we thank you all for your patience.

[Image: Untitled]

## New Toasts 🍞

Not much to say here. Our old toasts were hard on the eyes and didn’t match the rest of the UI. We’ve since updated them to look much nicer.

[Image: Untitled]

## Improvements and Fixes

- Historical searching of logs is now 50x faster
- Fixed issue where some historical logs would not appear
- Build logs now use the [new deployment logs system](https://blog.railway.app/p/building-logs-v2)
- Fixed all of the node and python starters when using Paketo Buildpacks
- Updated the Elixir Phoenix Starter to 1.6
- Changed the ktor starter to Kotlin Spring
- Added the Datadog Agent starter
- Percy /move thread now links to old thread
- The experimental builder is now the [full Paketo builder](https://github.com/paketo-buildpacks/full-builder)