It’s been an all-out feature fest around here for the past couple of weeks between launching 

It’s been a ton of fun as we’ve opened the quarter burning down big feature after big feature on our way to becoming your favorite infra provider’s favorite infra provider.

We’re excited to have those features out in general availability and we have a whole bunch of stuff coming up next — we’re talking 

So with that said, we’re going to take a deep breath this week and release a few smaller things. 

You can now reference variables across services

We’ve added the ability to reference variables across services. 

The meta story is that we’re in the process of transforming the concept of a database plugin on Railway to “a service with one or more volumes attached plus a Docker image.” 

We think this reconfiguring of the plugin concept will make it clearer going forward what a plugin actually is, which is sort of difficult to define at the moment.

So for the now, this change allows services to create variables (possibly composed of other service variables) that can be 

 and used by other services — for example the "web" service referencing 

Now that you know, you may go forth and get started linking variables at your leisure. 

We’ve been enjoying the enthusiastic response to Cron Jobs, which you may remember we revealed in this space just last week.

I wasn't expecting the job to be executed directly after deployment, but rather at the cron date.


We just wanted to take this space to let you know. 

, so check those out if you wanna cron some jobs. Remember you’ll have to join 

We’ve got some spicy updates to Nixpacks for ya! 

 about missing environment variables. This should reduce confusion when deploying Larvel for the first time and generally improve the first-time experience for PHP users.

 for PHP projects, which should come in handy. 

If there are more updates you’d like to see to Nixpacks — and especially if you’d like to contribute — make sure to jump into our 

We added markdown support for template descriptions

Big shout-out to Pavan Sunkara for shipping a 

! It even supports new features like Docker Images and Cron Schedules! 💫

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1689988188/service-vars_q2zmf1.png

Service Variable References, Cron Jobs Part Deux, Nixpacks Updates

Changelog #0143