Railway

Railway is a project for people who have apps running in a PaaS like Heroku and are looking to make the move to AWS. With a single command it can:

1. Create a custom AMI with everything a Rails app need;
2. Create a development/staging environment with webservers, workers, cache and job redis instances, postgres database and support for up to 9 branches of your app at the same time;
3. Create a production environment with load balanced webservers, workers, cache and job redis instances, postgres database with a read replica and rolling restarts;
4. Deploy to development/stating environment;
5. Deploy to production using rolling restarts;
6. Update production servers to get the latest security updates;
7. Upgrade production servers to a new AMI with zero downtime;
8. Compile ImageMagick and Libvips from source in order to get versions more recent, faster, and with more supported formats than the ones available in official repos;

To make all this work it makes some strong assumptions about the rails app it will deploy:

1. Puma as webserver;
2. Sidekiq as worker;
3. Redis as cache and job;
4. Postgres as database;
5. Node/Yarn for javascript;
6. Majestic Monolith instead of Microservices;
7. Ubuntu 20.04;
8. No containers;

It relies the following services in AWS:

1. EC2 for webservers and workers;
2. Elasticache for Redis;
3. RDS for postgres;
4. Cloudwatch for logging and server metrics;
5. ELB for Load Balancer;

Railway does not try to be web scale. It's targeted at small dev teams (or sole developers) who have a single person who does devops on the side. It was born and battle tested at FestaLab where we use it daily.

Where do I start?

I've always been a fan of those "choose your own adventure" game books, so let's do the same here:

• If you are not sure about this whole moving from Heroku to AWS thing, click here;
• If you would like to know more about the infrastructure that Railway will create, click here;
• If you are ready to start your journey, click here;
• If you have already done the install steps and want to bring up the infrastucture, click here;
• If you already have the sample app running, and need to change things to make your app work with Railway, click here;
• If your app is running in production and you want to know to handle your day to day needs, click here;

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/FestaLab/railway. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

If you with to submit pull requests, please check the contribution guide to make handling your credentials easier.

License

The project is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the Railway project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.