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Railway CLI

Deploy and manage apps on Railway from the terminal

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Cloud & Services linuxmacoswindows Rust MIT

Description

Railway CLI lets you interact with the Railway platform from the command line. You can link local projects, deploy code, manage environment variables, provision databases, view logs, and manage services without leaving the terminal.

Install

homebrewbrew install railway
npmnpm i -g @railway/cli

AI Summary

CLI for the Railway deployment platform. Link local projects, deploy code, manage environment variables, provision databases, and view logs from the terminal.

Capabilities

  • + Deploy applications to Railway with git push or CLI commands
  • + Manage environment variables and secrets per environment
  • + Provision and connect databases (Postgres, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB)
  • + View real-time logs from deployed services
  • + Link local projects to Railway services for development

Use When

  • → Deploying applications to the Railway platform
  • → Managing Railway environment variables and services from the terminal
  • → Need a quick deployment platform with database provisioning
  • → Running local development connected to Railway services

Avoid When

  • x Not using Railway as your deployment platform
  • x Need fine-grained infrastructure control (use AWS/GCP CLIs)
  • x Deploying to Kubernetes or other container orchestration

Usage Patterns

Deploy current project

railway up

Deploys the current directory to the linked Railway service

Run a command with Railway env vars

railway run npm start

Executes the command with all Railway environment variables injected

View deployment logs

railway logs

Streams real-time logs from the deployed service

Input / Output

stdin: Accepts interactive input for login and project selection
stdout: Deployment status, logs, and environment variable listings
stderr: Error messages and deployment warnings

Typical Pipelines

railway link && railway up to connect and deploy a project
railway run prisma migrate deploy to run database migrations with Railway env vars
railway variables | grep DATABASE to check database connection strings

Related Tools

render-cli alternative

Render CLI is an alternative cloud platform CLI for deploying apps
docker complementary

Railway can deploy Docker containers; Docker builds the images
View AGENTS.md for Railway CLI