Can I deploy to railway.app?

[kstulgys]

If so, how do I manage dev and prod environments? Can I somehow persist the data between builds /deploys?

[ganigeorgiev]

I don't have experience with railway but from a quick look at their services documentation it doesn't look like they have option for mounting persistent storage like in fly.io. There is something what they call "persistent database" service but that will not work with PocketBase.

Edit: The above is no longer true as Railway added support for volumes. See the comments below or the 1-click app in #2784.

[GuilhermeAmado]

I have managed to deploy to Railway using this
https://github.com/GuilhermeAmado/pocketbase-docker

[GuilhermeAmado]

Oops forgot to mention it. You just have to use the Dockerfile in that repo.

[ganigeorgiev]

While it may be possible to start the PocketBase executable in railway, I still don't think you can actually use it as a host (unless you combine it with Litestream or something similar) because it doesn't seem that railway has persistent storage and you'll loose your pb_data on restart. Please correct me if that's not the case.

[YerayAlonso]

Indeed, you can deploy pocketbase in railway (done with this) but you loose everything when you "Redeploy" (not when you just "Restart" the container)

[SKumarSpace]

Railway released Volumes support - https://docs.railway.app/reference/volumes. This is now possible!
I wrote a tutorial for it here: https://www.shrey.com/blog/deploy-pocketbase-on-railway

[charbs-io]

Would you know how I can get pb_hooks directory to run?

[ganigeorgiev]

@charbs-io You can update your Dockerfile to copy the local pb_hooks, pb_migrations etc. directories into the image with something like:

COPY ./pb_hooks /pb_hooks

You can also find an alternative Dockerfile to the above example in https://pocketbase.io/docs/going-to-production/#using-docker (the volume in the docs example Dockerfile is expected to be mounted in /pb/pb_data).

[charbs-io]

Thanks @ganigeorgiev - i played around and got it working with this (for anyone interested).

FROM alpine:3 as downloader

ARG TARGETOS
ARG TARGETARCH
ARG VERSION=0.18.8

ENV BUILDX_ARCH="${TARGETOS:-linux}_${TARGETARCH:-amd64}"

# Install the dependencies
RUN apk add --no-cache \
    ca-certificates \
    unzip \
    wget \
    zip \
    zlib-dev

RUN wget https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/releases/download/v${VERSION}/pocketbase_${VERSION}_${BUILDX_ARCH}.zip \
    && unzip pocketbase_${VERSION}_${BUILDX_ARCH}.zip \
    && chmod +x /pocketbase

COPY pb_hooks /pb_hooks
COPY pb_migrations /pb_migrations

FROM scratch

EXPOSE 8090

COPY --from=downloader /pocketbase /usr/local/bin/pocketbase
COPY --from=downloader /pb_hooks /pb_hooks
COPY --from=downloader /pb_migrations /pb_migrations

CMD ["/usr/local/bin/pocketbase", "serve", "--http=0.0.0.0:8090", "--dir=/pb_data", "--publicDir=/pb_public", "--hooksDir=/pb_hooks", "--migrationsDir=/pb_migrations"]

I have to say, Railway is an absolute breeze to work with - much easier than fly.io from my experience.

I was even able to setup 2 environments (staging + production). My PB hooks are working, migrations are working. Domains were super easy to setup too (per environment). I feel like it's the perfect companion to PocketBase.

EDIT: @SKumarSpace - thanks again for the tutorial - it was very helpful.