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Version: 2.0.0

Railway

Railway is a hosted platform for deploying infrastructure and application services. If you want to run SpacetimeDB without managing your own VM, the official Railway template is a quick way to get started.

The template deploys the first-party clockworklabs/spacetime image, exposes port 3000, and provisions persistent storage at /stdb. Once the service is running, you can publish one or more databases to it with the SpacetimeDB CLI.

Prerequisites​

  1. A Railway account
  2. The SpacetimeDB CLI installed: Install SpacetimeDB
  3. A SpacetimeDB module project ready to publish

Step 1: Deploy the Railway template​

Open the official deployment template:

SpacetimeDB Template

Then:

  1. Click Deploy Now.
  2. Create a new Railway project or choose an existing one.
  3. Wait for the deployment to finish.
  4. In Railway, open your service and copy its public domain or attach a custom domain.

That domain is the base URL your CLI and clients will use to connect to this SpacetimeDB instance.

Step 2: Add the Railway deployment to your CLI​

Register your Railway deployment as a named server:

spacetime server add --url https://<your-railway-domain> railway

For example:

spacetime server add --url https://my-railway-app.up.railway.app railway

You can optionally verify the connection:

spacetime server ping railway

Step 3: Publish your database​

From your SpacetimeDB project, publish a database to the Railway deployment:

spacetime publish my-database --server railway

To update an existing database later, run the same command again.

Step 4: Connect clients​

After publishing, connect your client to your Railway-hosted database using your Railway domain as the server URI and your database name.

See Connecting to SpacetimeDB for the current client connection patterns across supported SDKs.

Notes​

  • The Railway template sets up the SpacetimeDB server itself, but it does not publish your module for you. You still deploy your database schema and logic with spacetime publish.
  • A single Railway-hosted SpacetimeDB instance can host multiple databases.
  • If you want full control over the host, reverse proxy, and operating system setup, see Self-hosting.