Deploy and Host Rails on Railway

Rails 8.1 on Ruby 3.4, in the production container Rails generates for itself.

About Hosting Rails

The Rails template on Railway deploys a starter pinned to Rails 7.0.3 and Ruby 3.1.2 - both from 2022. About one deployment in six fails.

It also deploys Redis from bitnami/redis with no tag. Bitnami restricted its public catalogue in 2025: that repository now carries digests and metadata but no version tags, so a plain bitnami/redis reference is a pull waiting to fail. This template does not ship Redis at all - add it when you actually need Solid Queue or Action Cable at scale, and use the official redis image.

Common Use Cases

A Rails application with a real database, migrations and background jobs ahead of it
An internal tool where Active Record and the generators are most of the work
A starting point that boots correctly behind a proxy, on the assigned port

Dependencies for Rails Hosting

Postgres, included in this template, on a persistent volume
Nothing else.

Deployment Dependencies

Rails guides: https://guides.rubyonrails.org
Source: https://github.com/ak40u/rails-railway-starter

Implementation Details

This is a rails new scaffold on current Rails, with four changes:

Change	Why
HTTP_PORT bridged from PORT	Thruster defaults to 80; the platform assigns the port
railway.json	Health check on /up, restart on failure
Encrypted credentials removed	The master key is gitignored, so a template cannot rely on it - SECRET_KEY_BASE is used instead
A root route	A fresh Rails app has no root, so a deployed template would greet you with a 404

Everything else is Rails own production Dockerfile: multi-stage, non-root user, jemalloc, bootsnap precompiled, assets built at image time.

/up is Rails built-in health endpoint - it returns 200 only if the app boots without raising, so a red check means the application genuinely cannot start. Migrations run through Rails own bin/docker-entrypoint, which calls db:prepare before the server starts: it creates the database on the first deploy and migrates on later ones.

Variable	Why
SECRET_KEY_BASE	Generated; signs sessions and cookies
DATABASE_URL	Wired to the bundled Postgres over the private network
RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT	Logs reach the platform rather than a file nobody reads

Why Deploy Rails on Railway?

A database, a domain and TLS from one deploy, and the container Rails itself recommends - so you are not maintaining a bespoke Dockerfile that drifts from the framework.