Add support for stopping, pausing, and resuming services directly from the CLI

[alanrezendeee]

💡 Description

Currently, the Railway CLI allows developers to deploy and manage services, but it lacks a simple way to stop, pause, or resume a running service directly from the command line.
This feature would be extremely helpful for developers who want more control over their environments, especially in situations like:

Temporarily disabling a service to save resources or costs.

Stopping services before performing updates or maintenance.

Quickly pausing development environments during inactive periods.

🧩 Proposed Solution

Introduce new CLI commands:

railway service stop — gracefully stops the selected service.

railway service pause — pauses the service without removing resources.

railway service resume or railway service start — brings the service back online.

🚀 Expected Benefits

Improve developer experience by adding full lifecycle control to the CLI.

Reduce unnecessary usage costs for idle environments.

Enable faster environment management for development and staging setups.

🧠 Additional Thoughts

Other platforms like Docker, Railway competitors, and even Railway’s own dashboard UI already support similar actions.
Exposing this through the CLI would bring parity with the dashboard and make automation or CI/CD scripting more powerful.

[brody192]

Hello,

We have railway down and railway redeploy

These commands achieve what you want, bringing a service down and bringing it back online.

[alanrezendeee]

Hi @brody192 ,

Thank you for your response. I appreciate that you mention the commands railway down and railway redeploy as ways to bring a service down and bring it back online.

I have a couple of follow-up questions to clarify exactly how they behave and what is supported:

Does railway down pause a service (keeping resources allocated) or does it remove/stop the service entirely (and possibly deallocate resources)?

Is there a resume, start, or similar command to bring a service back exactly where it left off, or is railway redeploy the only way to bring it back online?

I could not find a corresponding “pause/stop/start” control in the UI (dashboard) — is this capability CLI-only, or will the UI also show/present those controls in a future release?

The reason I’m asking is because in many use-cases (for dev, staging or scheduled downtime) the ability to pause a service (rather than fully remove it) is particularly valuable (for cost savings and fast restarts). It would be great to understand exactly what the tooling supports today, so I can plan accordingly.

Thanks again for your help!
Best regards,
Alan Rezende
Brazilian

[brody192]

down will simply remove the active deployment, we do not have a way to pause a service, not via API, dashboard, or CLI.

Removing a deployment would indeed stop any resources (aside from disk) since nothing would be running to consume the resources.

A redeploy is then needed to bring the service back online.

[alanrezendeee]

Thanks for clarifying!
It would be great to have a real “pause/resume” feature in the future, especially for development and staging environments to save costs and avoid full redeploys.
Appreciate your time and detailed explanation 🙌