What’s happening folks? It’s the Changelog Delivery Service here to bring you some exciting new updates from your favorite app development platform.
This week we’re diving back into variables to bring some upgrades to Railway Provided Variables. We’re also shipping Log Explorer, which launched to Priority Boarding last week.
We also wanted to let you know that we’re still looking to add a few new teammates by the end of the quarter.
Finally, we did a really fun collaboration with Prisma this week and, well, rather than tell you about that here, we suggest you go check out the blogpost and video!
Read on for more!
Reference Railway Provided Variables
We recently added the ability to reference variables across services. We mentioned previously that this was a forward step in the direction of reconstituting plugins as a set of useful primitives rather than something proprietary to Railway.
This week we’ve taken another step forward and unlocked the ability to reference Railway provided variables (RPVs) across services. This allows you to alias the public or private domain of a service without needing to hard-code it.
We’ve also updated RPVs to make them clearer and more consistent. The most important change is in the variable definitions for a services network:
RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAINnow contains the service or custom domain of a serviceRAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAINnow contains the private DNS name of a service
As an example, if you wanted to talk with a service over a private network, instead of hardcoding the domain in your app, you can now create the variable API_SERVER=${{ service.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN }} which will resolve to the actual DNS name when deployed.
Sweet!
Check out the docs for a full list of RPVs and their descriptions.
Note: Legacy RPVs still exist, but will be deprecated moving forward.
Oh, and one more thing!
We’ve also improved variable references in templates. Just use the name of a service or plugin to reference any of its variables, like so:
The template creation form doesn’t have autocomplete just yet, but we are planning on updating that soon.
GA Log Explorer
Last week we shipped Log Explorer to Priority Boarding. This week we’re making it generally available, with a couple major new features!
- Table view with resizable/toggle-able columns
- Early version of a date-range picker
- Button in navbar for easier access.
Log Explorer is generally available but is intentionally an early release, so be sure to jump on Discord and let us know how it’s working for you.
Railway is Growing! (And Hiring!)
Our team has recently grown to 17 and we’re still filling roles as fast as we can! This week we are welcoming Melissa (our first Solutions Engineer) and Valerie, a Product Designer joining Jitachi.
Do you have an interest in bringing human friendly design to internet infra? Would you like to join us?
Here are a few of the roles we’d love to fill before the end of the quarter:
If you want to read about what it’s like to work at Railway, check out How We Work and How We Work (Volume II).
And be sure to check out the full range of open positions here!
Improvements and Fixes
- We collaborated with Prisma on a pair of templates for Prisma Pulse! Be sure to check out the blogpost and wonderful video demo!
- Nixpacks updated to v.1.13.0
- We fixed a bug that sometimes caused deleted services to be visible in public projects
- Fixed a UI bug related to using the bulk variable editor breaking forked environment changesets.