Hello, weary traveler, welcome to another changelog! 

Why don’t you relax by the campfire and we’ll regale you with tales of creating environments, generating unique variables, checking the health of your templates, and much more?

 set, there’s a new experience for you today. 

We have unified the flow around the “fork” system and the “new” system that was just arguably really confusing.

You can now create a new environment that copies all (or none!) of the variables and config from an existing environment.

The new way to create an environment gives you more power and control

Want to create a full copy of your environment to be used as a staging or development workspace? 

Easy. Copy everything (services, variables, and config) over.

Want to test out ideas in isolation and selectively merge the changes back into production?

 modal in the environment menu in the canvas. (Now try saying that five times fast…)

We’ve added a delightful new little feature to variables, but once again you’ll need to enable the 

The new Variable Generator is at your service!

The Variable Generator is a nifty little tool that you can use to templatize new variables for your services. 

Did you catch that you can do this on deploy? That’s cool, right? Variables created from a template that generate values on deploy now keep the generator associated with the variable. 

So when the environment is forked using the above flow, we will run the generator to create a new variable value.

This allows you to easily have different secret values (like database passwords) per environment. It also requires no intervention from you if you are deploying databases or templates. It will just work.™ 

 will automatically work with variable generators.

Variables with a generator will have a little 

icon to the left of the value. You can use the 3-dot menu to open up the generator menu.

 and the template you deploy doesn’t work out of the box. What do you do? Drive back to the store and try a new one?

After getting a bunch of feedback about template quality, engineers Faraz and Melissa spent some time and effort creating a new way to indicate the level of success of recent deployments for a given template. 

If anything goes wrong with your template? The template maintainer will now be aware of failure!

Popular templates now feature a health indicator based on recent activity

Check your templates to see if they’re succeeding in deploys!

 If you need help from the Railway team, please raise a support request, we are working with customers big and small to help them confidently move their data to the next generation of services.

Everyone on the platform received an email on final timeline — we stand at the ready to help your transition.

You can follow the in-product flow or use the migration guide.

Set a service name with an emoji as the first character and we will use that emoji as the service icon. 

We fixed an issue where services with emojis could not be used in reference variables

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1705717527/2024-0119_am9gcr.png

Unified Environment Creator, New Variable Generator, Template Health Indicators

Changelog #0169