Exposing Your App

Before your application can say hello, Railway needs to know the IP and port that your application is listening on, in order to expose it to the internet.

The easiest way to get up and running is to have your application listen on 0.0.0.0:$PORT, where PORT is a Railway-provided environment variable.

Alternatively, you can manually override the PORT environment variable by adding PORT to your projects variables page. (Command + K and type Variables or you can use the keyboard shortcut: G + V under your selected project)

Railway-Provided Domain

Railway services don't obtain a domain automatically, but you'll be notified to set one up as soon as we detect a deployment is listening correctly (as described above). Simply follow the prompts to generate a domain and your app will be exposed to the internet!

Custom Domains

One or more custom domains can be added to a Railway service (tied to a specific environment).

Here's how it works:

1. Navigate to the Settings tab of your desired service
2. Add a custom domain and type in the name
3. Add the CNAME record to the DNS settings for your domain
4. Wait for Railway to verify your CNAME record

NOTE!: Changes to DNS settings may take up to 72 hours to propagate worldwide.

Let's Encrypt SSL Certificates

Once a custom domain has been correctly configured, Railway will automatically generate and apply a Let's Encrypt certificate. This means that any custom domain on Railway will automatically be accessible via https://.

Provider Specific Instructions

If you have proxying enabled on Cloudflare (the orange cloud), you MUST set your SSL/TLS settings to full or above.

If proxying is not enabled, Cloudflare will not associate the domain with your Railway project with the following error.

Redirecting a Root Domain from Google Domains

Some domain registrars don't fully support CNAME records like Google Domains. As a result - when you add an @ record for a CNAME, Google Domains won't link it to the Railway service.

Workaround 1 - Root Domain Forwarding

In Google Domains, you can create a record to forward your domain root to the Railway service. You can do this by creating a CNAME in the Custom Records section pointing to www to yourapp.yourrailwayproject.com

Then, under the Synthetic Records section, you can configure a Subdomain forward - enter @ in the subdomain and then www.yourdomain.com under the Destination URL entry.

Keep in mind, if Google's domain forwarding service is down, so is access to your service via that domain.

Workaround 2 - Cloudflare Proxy

You may also configure Cloudflare proxying for your domain to redirect your domain.

After a custom domain is added to the Railway service follow the instructions listed on Cloudflare's documentation to configure the proxy.