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 (wildcard domains are supported)
3. Add the CNAME records to the DNS settings for your domain
4. Wait for Railway to verify your CNAME record

NOTE: For wildcard domains, see the section below. Changes to DNS settings may take up to 72 hours to propagate worldwide. Freenom is not allowed, and not supported.

Wildcard Domains

There are a few important things to know when using Wildcard Domains:

1. Ensure that the CNAME record for authorize.railwaydns.net is not proxied by your provider (eg: Cloudflare). This is required for the verification process to work.
2. Wildcards can be used for any subdomain level (eg: *.yourdomain.com or *.subdomain.yourdomain.com).
3. You cannot nest wildcards (eg: *.*.yourdomain.com).

In order to use Wildcard Domains, you must add two CNAME records, one for the wildcard domain, and one for the _acme-challenge. The _acme-challenge CNAME is required for Railway to issue the SSL Certificate for your domain.

NOTE: If you're using Cloudflare, it is important that the _acme-challenge record has Cloudflare proxying disabled (no orange cloud).

TCP Proxying

You can proxy TCP traffic to your service by creating a TCP proxy in the service settings. Enter the port that you want traffic proxied to, Railway will generate a domain and port for you to use. All traffic sent to domain:port will be proxied to your service. This is useful for services that don't support HTTP, such as databases.

Private Networks

To expose an application on the private network you need to bind your application to the ipv6 address of :: and specify the port(s) you want to use.

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:

Also note that if proxying is enabled, you can NOT use a domain deeper than a first level subdomain without Cloudflare's Advanced Certificate Manager. For example, anything falling under *.yourdomain.com can be proxied through Cloudflare without issue, however if you have a custom domain under *.subdomain.yourdomain.com, you MUST disable Cloudflare Proxying and set the CNAME record to DNS Only (the grey cloud), unless you have Cloudflare's Advanced Certificate Manager.

Redirecting a Root Domain Workarounds

Some domain registrars don't fully support CNAME records. As a result - when you add an @ record for a CNAME, the domain registrar will create an invalid A record.

Registrars that are known to not fully support CNAME records for the root domain include:

• Freenom
• GoDaddy
• Ionos

Workaround 1 - 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.

Workaround 2 - Changing your Domain's Nameservers

You can also change your domain's nameservers to point to Cloudflare's nameservers. This will allow you to use a CNAME record for the root domain. Follow the instructions listed on Cloudflare's documentation to change your nameservers.