Railway
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What is Railway?
Railway is an infrastructure platform that provisions and deploys backend services, databases and full-stack apps from a repository, without hand-written infrastructure configuration.
An infrastructure platform designed to instantly provision and deploy backend services, databases, and full-stack applications without writing complex configuration files.
Railway abstracts away Kubernetes and traditional DevOps. Developers connect a repository, and Railway automatically detects the language, builds the container, and deploys the application. It provides an intuitive canvas to easily spin up connected Postgres or Redis databases alongside backend code with built-in networking.
How it relates to Orbit
Orbit shows Railway deploy health, logs, and failure snippets in a project’s Git/Deploy area. See Project Window for details.
When you would use it
You use Railway when you want the simplicity of a platform-as-a-service (like Heroku) but need the flexibility to run any Dockerized backend service or database instantly.
Common operations
- Quickly deploying a Node.js backend API and a connected Postgres database.
- Hosting a full-stack monolithic application with zero DevOps overhead.
Frequently asked questions
Can Orbit show Railway deploys?
Yes. A Railway project gets a deploy-health dot and a panel with logs and failure snippets. See Watch Deploy Health.
Can AI clients read Railway logs through Orbit?
Yes, through orbit_railway_deployments and orbit_railway_logs on Orbit’s MCP server. See MCP Tool Catalog.