Q: Can you guess what we’re shipping this week?
A: The Railway Community Forum (in Preview)!
Note: This question has now been resolved, thank you. For further questions, please read the rest of this changelog. 😜
Let’s go!
Railway Community Forum Preview
Ok, here’s the deal.
We’ve got a Discord server with 20K+ users on it. We’ve got a Canny feedback board with thousands of feature votes and comments. We’ve got a Help property with a mishmash of resources on it …
But we’ve never had a way to unify these properties into a cohesive in-app experience that combines excellent community help with an open roadmap discussion … until now!
The Railway Community Forum, which we’re releasing today in Preview, is a glimpse of a future of unified community support, product roadmap, discussion forum, and overall Railway help center.
Let’s answer some questions:
Q: Are you home-rolling the Community Forum?
A: Why yes we are! We don’t like any vendored or open source solutions.
Q: Does it run on Railway?
A: It sure does!
Q: What if I like the Discord server and Canny feedback board?
A: Discord isn’t going anywhere for the time being, but we’ll soon be deprecating Canny. That said, we’d like to see how users respond to this preview. Our goal is to build a unified in-app experience that is superior to the pastiche of services we use today to engage with our wonderful community.
Q: How can I weigh-in on development of this forum?
A: Great question! Head over to the Community Forum Preview post, log in to your Railway account, and drop a comment!
Any other questions?
We’re going to be iterating on this property like crazy so please let us know what you’d like out of a first-class forum experience!
What are you waiting for? Check out the Community Forum Preview now!
Nested Log Attributes
Great news for all you log lovers out there — nested log attributes are now supported!
This feature is going straight to General Availability so from now on you’ll be able to drill into any nested objects or arrays from within the service-level logs or in the Observability tab.
When you click on a nested log attribute, we’ll also populate the correct JSONPath syntax in the filter bar.
That’s all you need to know! Enjoy!
Service Groups Preview
Today we’re also releasing an extremely early version of Service Groups, a new feature that makes it easy to view and compose multiple services as a collection in the Railway canvas.
Service Groups is under development with large and complex applications in mind. We want to make it easier to understand which services are related to each other (or networked together), as well as make it easy to collapse multiple nodes in the same group into a single node to make them easier to work with.
This feature is available today for Priority Boarding users who opt-in to the Canvas Service Groups (Alpha) feature flag.
If you try out Service Groups, we’d love to get your early feedback!
Head over to the Community Forum post to let us know how we can make Service Groups work best for your application.
Fixes and Improvements
- We made some copy updates to the Railway landing page — can you spot the changes?
- We implemented a fix to prevent users from promoting database variables when referenced by a container
- We made some small quality-of-life improvements to log filtering
- We fixed an issue that sometimes caused users to be unable to change deployment branches in GitHub
- We fixed a bug a service region could not be changed if there was no volume attached
- Fixed various issues with the plugin migration flow