Should we drop five headline items in this week’s changelog? 

Should we drop them here in the preamble for those with short attention spans?

How do you want them — what about a javascript object?

const changelog = {
	"item1": "we added a way to make instant templates from docker-compose.yml",
	"item2": "we added a shortcut to deploy your latest commit",
	"item3": "we added three new ways to filter logs",
	"item4": "we added deployment actions to the activity feed",
	"item5": "we added a way to achieve instant private networks"
}

Read on to get the liner notes — including a number of big reveals about our upcoming roadmap. 

 for high-growth startups new to Railway. Check out the 

The Railway Template Creator is now capable of inferring services from a docker-compose.yml file

We’re introducing a really cool new feature today that makes it possible to drag-and-drop a docker compose file onto the 

Under the hood, this feature infers the services specified in the file and creates the appropriate Railway resources to represent the file.

This is a big feature for those of you who’ve been asking for an easy way to support complex templates. As in the example above, it’s now possible to create a multi-service Umami template in 7 seconds.

 if you have any comments or suggestions.

Use the command palette to deploy the latest commit to a service

Lots of you have been asking for a way to force deploy your latest commit at the service level.

We can’t tell you the number of times we’ve had to let people know about hacky workarounds like pushing a newline to your repo — but thankfully those days have come to an end. 

Starting today you can deploy your latest commit via the command palette.

Log level is now clickable, log level is now in autocomplete, and log attributes are now in autocomplete

We shipped a trio of improvements to log filtering this week. The first two involve log “levels” which refer to the location or service emitting the logs in question.

Log levels are now clickable as a quick way to filter them

Log levels are now accessible via autocomplete in the search bar

 are now accessible via autocomplete in the search bar

If that doesn’t make sense, go ahead and watch the screencap above, which attempts to show all three of these improvements in about 18 seconds.

By the way — you might notice we’ve been shipping a lot of logging improvements recently and you can expect that trend to continue. We’re looking forward to it.

If you have feedback for us on how to improve the logging experience further, please 

The activity feed now includes deployment events

, which provides a digest of the major actions taken in your Railway project, is undergoing a major renovation in preparation for better webhooks support (build your own CI pipeline, anyone?) and alerting support. 

Not to get too hyped up about this or anything … but we’re excited about what’s coming down the pipe here. 

To start, we’re adding events to the activity timeline to help you and your teammates get a better understanding of your project lifecycle. 

 to the timeline. As you can see in the image above, you’ll now see successful and crashed deployments as well as changes across services.

We’ll keep you posted over the quarter as we ship further improvements.

If you have requests for logging improvements, 

We’re starting to roll out a new runtime for the underlying containers running on Railway. 

Although we’re making enormous improvements here, this is technically an implementation detail since it’s mostly about under-the-hood performance tuning.

However, with that said, the reason we’re mentioning it this week is that 

this new runtime decreases private networking initialization duration to 0 seconds

That’s a big improvement from the current runtime which requires a cold start to get a PrivNet — something that’s very, very, very inconvenient if you need your application to talk to services instantly.

If you’re interested in trying out this runtime here are a couple of things to know:

If that sounds good to you, you’ll need to set the following 

The deployment will switch over to the new runtime on redeploy.

Congratulations! Private Networking is now available to your service before application start. 

Questions? Concerns? Spin-up a thread in 

 to better support deploying with Railway in GitHub Actions. This minor release was entirely driven by the 

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1713564099/2024-0419_fhwprv.png

Drag and Drop Docker Compose, Deploy Latest Commit, Log Filter Improvements, Activity Feed Updates, New Beta Runtime

Changelog #0182