Public API Reference

The Railway public API is built with GraphQL and is the same API that powers the Railway dashboard.

If you haven't used GraphQL before, here are a few resources to get started:

1. The official Introduction to GraphQL
2. The GraphQL Basics course by Hasura
3. GraphQL is the better REST to understand how it is different from a REST API

Endpoint

The Railway API supports introspection meaning you can use popular tools like Postman or Insomnia to query the schema.

GraphiQL Playground

Alternatively, you can use our GraphiQL playground to view the schema and test your queries.

Authentication

To use the API, you will need an API token. You can create one by visiting the tokens page in your account settings. There are two types of tokens you can create.

Team token

If you select a Team in the dropdown in the image above, the token will be tied to that team and will have access to all the team's resources. This token cannot be used to access your personal resources on Railway so feel free to share it with your teammates.

Personal token

If you do not select a Team, the token will be tied to your Railway account and will have access to all your resources. Do not share this token with anyone else.

Once you have your token, you can pass it within the Authorization header of your request. You can try the query below in the terminal of your choice. It should return your name and email on Railway:

Rate Limits

In order to protect the Railway API from spam and misusage, we have established some basic rate limits. The current limit is 1000 requests per hour to the API. To help you keep track of your usage, Railway sends a few headers with the response on each request.

Examples

To help you get started, here are a few examples for reference.

Projects

Fetch all your projects

The query below will fetch all your personal projects along with all the services, plugins and environment for them.

Delete a project

The mutation below will delete the project with the specified id.

Plugins

Add a plugin to a project

The mutation below will add the redis plugin to the specified project. The response will contain all the fields from the newly created plugin.

Services

Create a new service with a GitHub repo

The mutation below will create a new service with the specified GitHub repo attached. The response will contain the newly created service.

Deployments

Fetch latest active deployment

The query below will fetch the latest active deployment for a service for a specific environment.

Restarting a deployment

The query below will restart the deployment with the specified id.

Variables

Fetch variables for a service

The query below will fetch all the variables for a service for a specific environment. The response will contain all the variables in a key/value object.

Upsert variable for a service

The mutation below will upsert a new variable for the specified service within the specified environment. You can use this to both create and update variables.

Tips and Tricks

Resource IDs

While building your queries, if you quickly need to copy resource IDs, you can hit Cmd/Ctrl + K within your project and copy the project/service/environment ID.

The network tab

If you're unsure about what query/mutation to use for what you are trying to achieve, you can always do the action in the dashboard and look for the request in the network tab. As we use the same API internally, you can simply grab the name and then look for specific query in the introspected schema.

External resources

1. The awesome-graphql repository is a great resource for all things GraphQL with implementations available across a variety of languages.
2. The GraphQL Discord is the official Discord channel for graphql.org with a lot of active members and specific help channels.

Support

If you run into problems using the API or have any suggestions, feel free to join our Discord server where you can interact with the engineers working on the API directly.