This time next week the Railway team will be loading up to travel to Mallorca for our semi-yearly retreat, so we’re bringing you as many features and quality of life improvements as we can until we take off.

Meanwhile, the end of the quarter is shaping up nicely.

In addition to conquering just about all of our quarterly ambitions, we’ve also (

) just placed a large order for the very first batch of Railway server hardware … so needless to say we’re extremely excited about the weeks and months ahead.

We’ll have much more to say about that later on.

For this week, we’ll be bringing you a new way to customize templates, better support tooling, and some nifty new improvements to variable autocomplete and build logs access.

We invite you to sit back, relax, and let us walk you through Changelog #0178.

It’s now possible to eject a service from its upstream template

, Railway would automatically create a repo in your GitHub for the template. 

Some users didn’t always want that, so a few weeks back we introduced 

 where Railway can optionally use the public repo as the template source, thereby removing the mandatory condition that Railway copy the repo into your GitHub.

But what if you wanted to manage a copy of the repo later on? Maybe you need to update the config or image version, or have another reason you need to close source on a particular service…

Well this week we’re shipping a preview of an improvement just for this scenario. 

To close the loop on two-way-sync optionality with GitHub, we’ve introduced the ability to 

 a service from its public upstream repo and copy it into your own GitHub at any time.

Then you should see that template services now have an 

 identifier in the services pane. Next to 

 button to eject from the public repo and copy the repo into the GitHub account of your choosing. 

We hope this improvement gives you a lot more control when working with templates.

It’s now possible to create a deployment-aware ticket directly from a crashed deploy

 button to the logs pane of crashed or failed deploys. 

The idea behind this button is to let you always be a click away from getting help from a Railway Support Engineer or Community Member when you need it most. 

This week we’ve improved the button to make it more useful to you (and to our support team). Instead of directing you to the Help Center, the button now calls a modal to submit a new thread directly to the Help Center along with pre-populated metadata from your deployment.

Not only will this help you get better, faster support, it’ll also help us better triangulate your issue.

So if you get into some trouble (remember this button only appears when your build crashes or fails), be sure to smash that button!

We look forward to helping you get unstuck. 💪

New Railway Provided Variables Autocomplete

Railway Provided Variables from other services are now available as autocomplete options

, and they’ve already been a smash hit.

This week we’re extending their utility by making them available as autocomplete targets 

In other words, you can now access Railway Provided Variables for a given service 

It’s a small improvement but one we think will prove quite useful. 

 how else we can make variables work best for you.

There’s a new easy way to introspect build logs in the Log Explorer

This is another small quality of life improvement that we think will be a lift to a large number of users. 

We’ve added a helper button in the deploy logs to make it much easier to introspect build logs specifically in the Log Explorer.

To try this feature out, tab over to a service’s 

We (finally!) added the ability to rename environments ✨

We improved the line wrapping preference in logs to apply to log attributes as well as parent logs

We fixed a small issue when configuring Shared Variables

We fixed a small visual issue with the new Template Composer

We fixed a bug when deploying a template to a specific environment

We fixed a bug when filtering Settings by search term

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1711154356/2024-0322_tthwvz.png

Eject Services from a Template, Contextual Help Requests, RPV Autocomplete, Build Logs in Log Explorer