Three weeks ago we mentioned we’re working on bringing lifecycle management improvements to Railway. We’ve rolled out the first of these changes, which allow you to fork and merge environments, for Priority Boarding users this week.
Let’s get into how it works — and how you can provide direct feedback to influence the DX on this coming suite of features.
Fork and Merge Environments
Fork and merge environments with the first rollout of Railway Lifecycle Management featuresToday we’re launching a feature we’re really excited about. For us, Railway has always been about reducing friction in software development. If we can build 10x faster, we can build 10x better.
We’re biased, but we think we did a great job with the canvas, letting you spin up a Postgres instance instantly. But if you do this in another environment, you’re kinda on the hook for bringing your services/variables/etc over to prod from dev.
We want to change that, so today, we’re launching the first piece of our Lifecycle Management engine. When you create a new dev environment, we’ll let you copy variables instantly, make changes, and then apply any of those changes to upstream environments.
This means no more hitting merge and forgetting to copy in your STRIPE_KEY.
In the future, we’ll allow you to do this not just for variables, but for any configuration — services, start commands, and eventually, your entire development environment. (Think node 16 → node 18 → merge → boom! → done.)
It’s a simple start and we’re still working on the experience. We have some ideas, but we need you!
Fork/Merge Environments are live in Priority Boarding this week! Join here!
Use it, tell us what you think, and drop some comments on our feature tracker/RFC here!
Replicas Limit Doubled
By popular demand we’ve doubled the upper limit for replicas to 20. As a reminder, replicas are part of the Horizontal Scaling release from last week that allow you to scale your workloads across Railway boxes with built-in round-robin load balancing.
If you’re in need of more than 20 replicas, let us know! We’re happy to work with you to increase your overhead.
Improvements and Fixes
- We upgraded to Prisma 4 under the hood
- We fixed a number of issues related to GitHub rate limiting