MySQL for railway.app

Template Header

Deploy MySQL 8 on Railway with the official Docker image. This template gives you a ready-to-run relational database for application data, background jobs, or as a shared backing store for other services in your project. It ships with sane defaults, a built-in health check, and guidance for attaching persistent storage so your data survives redeploys.

🏗️ Architecture

flowchart LR
    Client(["📦 App / Client"]) --&gt;|"MySQL Protocol"| Proxy["Railway TCP Proxy"]
    Proxy --&gt;|"$PORT → 3306"| App["Container\nmysql:8.4"]
    App --&gt; Volume[("Volume\n/var/lib/mysql")]

Environment

Variable	Required	Description
`MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD`	Yes	Root password for MySQL

> [!IMPORTANT] > Set MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD (as a generated secret) in the Railway dashboard before the first deploy. On an uninitialized database, the container fails fast with a message pointing back here rather than starting without a password.

Optional

Variable	Description
`MYSQL_DATABASE`	Initial database name (default `app`)
`MYSQL_INIT_DUMP_URL`	HTTPS URL to a `.sql` or gzip-compressed `.sql.gz` dump; downloaded and imported automatically, but only on the first start of an empty volume. Takes precedence over `MYSQL_INIT_DUMP_BASE64` if both are set.
`MYSQL_INIT_DUMP_BASE64`	Same dump, base64-encoded and pasted directly as the variable value. Ignored if `MYSQL_INIT_DUMP_URL` is also set. Best for small dumps only.

> [!NOTE] > MYSQL_INIT_DUMP_URL/MYSQL_INIT_DUMP_BASE64 are only ever consulted on the very first start against a brand-new, empty volume. Once the database has initialized, both variables are silently ignored on every later restart or redeploy — even if you leave them set. The dump runs with full administrative privileges during bootstrap, so only point these at dumps from sources you trust.

Persistence

railway.toml declares requiredMountPath = "/var/lib/mysql". Attach a Railway volume to that path before production traffic — Railway will prompt for it based on this setting, but it is not created automatically.

Local

docker build -t railwayapp-mysql .
docker run --rm -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=dev -p 3306:3306 railwayapp-mysql