Help Implementing Branch Previews for Railway

[trim junco]

I am currently working on implementing neon branches via GitHub Actions whenever a new pull request is initiated. I've been inspired by the neon demo project "preview-branches-with-vercel." (https://github.com/neondatabase/preview-branches-with-vercel/tree/main)

However, I've encountered a challenge when trying to implement the preview site in Railway. The Railway CLI doesn't have an option for creating environments. I can't use automatically created PR environments, as the neon branch action creates a fresh database URL that the preview site needs to connect to the database.

I've been trying to find a viable workaround or a way to implement this. However, I'm currently stuck and could use some advice. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could go about this or if a feature/support is planned to enable such workflows within the Railway ecosystem?

[novel helm]

Project ID: N/A

[trim junco]

N/A

[eternal cobalt]

I think @solid badger has successfully done this exact same thing, though I can't remember if it was with planet scale or neon

[solid badger]

Indeed I have thanks for the tag Brody. Hey @trim junco I created my own GitHub action to do exactly this using neon & railway

The action I created is a bit barebones and only supports one service at the moment but I was thinking to expand it maybe this xmas weekend if I find some time but essentially

• https://github.com/Faolain/railway-pr-deploy (for instantiating the environment)
• https://github.com/Faolain/railway-pr-delete (for cleanup)

and then how to use it

and that's the github action on how to use it

[trim junco]

Thanks @solid badger and @Brody. It looks exactly like what I'm looking for. Thank you very much! I'll try it out later.

[solid badger]

You're very welcome!

Xmas gift 😛

[trim junco]

@solid badger It works like a charm. Thanks again

[solid badger]

you're very welcome!

🙂

[trim junco]

@solid badger Just one little thing: For some reason, steps.railway_deploy.outputs.domain appears to be empty 🤔

[solid badger]

ah sorry about that, I need to update the docs

it's service_domain, not domain that was an older version and I never changed it in the README

This is where I set it https://github.com/Faolain/railway-pr-deploy/blob/main/index.js#L282

just updated the docs for it

[trim junco]

I relied too heavily on IntelliSense 😊 It works now.

[solid badger]

haha perfect

I'm going to be doing an update to support multiple services as it's very "naive" now

Would love some railway input though and also some endpoints which would help simplify the steps quite heavily

open to any PRs though

[trim junco]

I also find it strange that it was not possible to make previews with railway cli.

[solid badger]

agreed, as it's shown it can be done, it's hacky but it works hehe

Sidenote I pushed another update to handle multiple services, it's also very very rudimentary at the moment and I don't suggest you update if what you have works @trim junco but I'm setting up infra so that split workers can work alongside an app. Latest is v2.0.4 but imo the action in theory isn't ready for public consumption as it's very shoot from the hip, I'd like something more professional but time is always a bottleneck. In any case if you happen to have multiple running applications in a project v2.0.4 will work (for example a worker app and an api)

[unreal blaze]

I'm working on a blog post which covers this. Glad to see that there's interest 😄

If you have any Neon-related questions feel free to reach out

[reef mason]

Hey @unreal blaze! Did that blog post end up coming out? 😄

[reef mason]

I'd love to know if there's an official way to integrate Neon branches with Railway's automatic PR environments

[unreal blaze]

I'm still looking into it. The Railway CLI doesn't support preview deployments so I'll need to do something with the API instead

[solid badger]

Hey @unreal blaze bumping this, #1188399481507545119 message we use this live in prod including neon branches & railway

[unreal blaze]

oh

this is very cool. I saw it but forgot to check it

I'll create my own project and try it out. Thanks @solid badger !