--- title: "Smart Canvas, Magic Config IV" date: 2025-12-05 number: 0267 url: https://railway.com/changelog/2025-12-05-smart-canvas --- # Smart Canvas, Magic Config IV December is here and so is our final stretch of shipping before the holidays. While everyone else is debating whether it's too early to play Christmas music (it's not), we've been heads-down making Railway smarter about telling you what's actually going on with your services. This week is all about visibility. Your canvas should be the source of truth for your infrastructure. At a glance, you should know if things are healthy, broken, or somewhere in between. We've shipped a bunch of improvements that make service states clearer, surface failures right where you need them, and give your cron jobs the feedback they deserve. We're also shipping the next iteration of Magic Config to Priority Boarding, making it even easier to go from repo to running services. Let's get into it! 🚄 ## Smart Canvas [Image: Improved service states showing online status and failure information] Your Railway canvas just got a lot smarter. We've shipped a batch of improvements that make it crystal clear what's happening with your services at a glance. No more guessing whether your service is actually online, or hunting through logs to figure out why something failed. **Clearer service states** — We've overhauled service states so it's immediately obvious whether your service is online and healthy. The visual feedback is more intuitive, giving you confidence that your services are doing what they should be doing. **Explicit failure information** — When something goes wrong, you shouldn't have to dig to find out what. Now, when a service experiences any kind of failure, we display exactly what failed right on the canvas. Build failed? You'll see "Build failed." Deploy crashed? It's right there. No more clicking around to piece together what went wrong. **Smarter cron displays** — For cron schedules, we now surface the information you actually care about: whether your scheduled job ran successfully. You'll see at a glance if your last run completed as expected, so you can trust your scheduled tasks are doing their job. [Video: Alert notifications right in the canvas when configured thresholds are exceeded] **Alert notifications** — When you configure alerts, you'll now see a notification pop up right in the canvas. Click on it, and you'll be taken directly to the observability dashboard to dive deeper into the metrics. It's a small touch that keeps you in flow while making sure you never miss what matters. These changes are all about reducing cognitive load. Your canvas should tell you the truth about your system at a glance — and now it does. If you have feedback or run into any issues, let us know on [Central Station](https://station.railway.com/new?type=feedback). ## Magic Config IV to Priority Boarding [Video: Select which services and databases to deploy in an existing project] New in [Priority Boarding](https://railway.com/account/feature-flags): the next evolution of Magic Config. Building on top of the previous iteration, Magic Config now gives you more control over what gets deployed in an *existing* project. After choosing to create a service from a GitHub repo, Railway will scan it and surface a dialog where you can pick and choose exactly which services or databases you want to deploy. Got a monorepo with multiple services? Select just the ones you need. Want to skip a database for now? Uncheck it. Previously, Magic Config would detect everything your repo needed, but you didn't have granular control over what to deploy. Now, you can be selective — deploy the frontend first while you figure out the backend config, or spin up just the database to test your connection strings. **Note:** The option to deploy everything all at once in an existing project is coming soon — for now, you'll select what you want and hit deploy. This is another step toward Railway truly understanding your code and getting out of your way. We scan your repo, show you what we found, and let you decide what happens next. Try it out in Priority Boarding and share your thoughts on [Central Station](https://station.railway.com/new?type=feedback). ## Fixes and Improvements - We fixed an issue where buckets in groups would jump out of the group after a short time. Buckets now stay put where you placed them - We improved the experience of configuring a cron schedule by adding a dropdown to the with common presets — hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and more. You can still set a custom cron expression if you need something specific, but now the most common schedules are just a click away