Railway, After Midnight
One year in development. One month in production. Two live apps. No server séances required.
I used to treat infrastructure like a rite of passage.
Spin up the Ubuntu server.
SSH in.
Update packages.
Install Python.
Configure nginx.
Wire up gunicorn.
Open the right ports.
Close the wrong ones.
Stare at logs like they might confess something.
There’s a certain romance to it.
There’s also a certain smell.
I’ve spent years inside EC2 instances and DigitalOcean droplets, carefully assembling production environments like fragile museum exhibits. It works. It’s powerful. It’s also exhausting. Many years ago I did this manually, eventually I started using Ansible for server setup and deployment and that was a massive improvement but it still came with its own problems.
About a year ago, I started using Railway for development.
A little over a month ago, I handed it production.
Nothing caught fire.
The Site in the Dark
One of the production apps running on Railway is
https://graveyardshiftlabs.com.
It’s built with Astro.
Astro feels like it was designed by someone who is tired of shipping JavaScript for no reason. It renders static HTML by default and sends zero JS unless you explicitly invite it in. Interactive pieces hydrate only where needed — their “islands architecture.”
It’s selective. Controlled. Efficient.
You get:
- File-based routing
- Native Markdown and MDX support
- Partial hydration
- The ability to use React, Vue, or whatever you prefer without turning the whole site into a client-side carnival
- Static or hybrid output
The result is simple: fast pages, clean output, no unnecessary noise.
Deploying it on Railway was almost suspiciously easy.
Connect the repo.
Set environment variables.
Push to main.
Watch it build.
No reverse proxy choreography.
No 2am debate with nginx.conf.
No quiet panic about whether gunicorn is actually running.
It just… ships.
Which is unsettling the first time.
The Ledger: Transaction Tracker
The second production app is my Transaction Tracker.
This one is less static poetry and more backend machinery:
- Django
- MySQL
- GitHub Actions for deployments
In my previous life, that stack meant ceremony.
Provision the server.
Install dependencies.
Secure the database.
Configure nginx.
Wire up gunicorn.
Debug static files.
Forget something.
Repeat.
Now?
Railway handles the environment. I attach a managed MySQL instance. I define environment variables. GitHub workflows push cleanly and predictably.
Deployments trigger.
Builds complete.
The app comes online.
No smoke. No ritual chanting. No SSH sessions that turn into existential reflection.
The CI/CD flow has been seamless and reliable. The configuration was almost offensively simple.
Standing up a new app on Railway is faster than provisioning a fresh Ubuntu box and remembering which blog post I bookmarked in 2018.
What Changed
EC2 isn’t bad.
DigitalOcean isn’t bad.
They’re powerful. They give you the keys to the entire building.
But they also hand you a mop and say, “Good luck.”
Railway abstracts the parts I no longer want to babysit.
It removes the infrastructure theater and leaves the execution. For greenfield builds, that speed is leverage. For side projects turning into real revenue, that leverage compounds.
When deployment friction disappears, you build more.
You hesitate less.
You ship.
One Year Later
I’ve used Railway for development for a year.
I’ve trusted it in production for over a month.
Two live apps. Real traffic. Real users.
No drama.
No surprise 3am alerts, so far…
No server necromancy.
No mysterious port already in use.
At the end of the day, infrastructure should fade into the background. It should hold the line quietly while you focus on product.
Railway has done exactly that.
I don’t think about it much anymore.
And that’s the highest compliment I can give a hosting platform.
Like all great things in life I do understand that Railway can always let me down one night but for now I’ll enjoy the honeymoon period.
—
Sleep well. The servers are steady.
— The Caretaker