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Platforms

Railway

Run Rivet workers on Railway.

Workers run in runner mode here: your service opens a connection out to the control plane on startup. It needs no public domain and nothing pasted into a connect form.

Requirements

Steps

Deploy the repository

Connect your GitHub account to Railway and select the repository. Railway detects and deploys it. See Railway’s quick start.

Set the environment variables

Add RIVET_ENDPOINT and RIVET_PUBLIC_ENDPOINT as service variables. Both values are described in Workers. See Railway’s variables docs.

If your control plane is another Railway service, reference its private domain rather than a public one.

Set the draining period

Railway kills the old deploy 0 seconds after SIGTERM by default, so actors are cut off mid-drain on every deploy.

Under Settings → Deploy, set Draining seconds. Actors need up to 30 minutes, so 2100 is the safe value. See Railway’s deployment teardown docs.

Verify

Open the dashboard and confirm your service appears under Runners. It reconnects automatically if the connection drops.

Signal handling

If your start command is a wrapper (npm start, yarn start, a shell script), the wrapper becomes PID 1 and swallows SIGTERM, so the drain never runs regardless of the draining period.

  • Invoke the binary directly, for example node dist/index.js.
  • Or run dumb-init or tini as PID 1 in your Dockerfile.

Scaling

Runner-mode workers are interchangeable, so raising the service’s replica count adds capacity with nothing to re-register. New replicas dial out and appear under Runners.

Removing a replica is the slow direction: it drains for up to 30 minutes, so keep the draining period at 2100 and reduce replica count gradually rather than in one step.

Railway has no CPU-target autoscaler, so replica count is fixed until you change it. Size it for peak traffic, or use Kubernetes or AWS ECS where the count moves with load.

Settings to avoid

Do not enable App Sleeping on a worker. Sleeping suspends the process, which drops its connection to the control plane, and Railway only wakes a service on inbound HTTP. Worker traffic is outbound, so the service would never wake and actors could not be scheduled to it.

Multi-region deploys are supported and place workers closer to your users.

Next steps

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