Railway is the fastest way to get AlabJS running on a managed server — push to GitHub and Railway builds and deploys automatically.

Setup

1. Push your AlabJS project to a GitHub repository.
2. Create a new Railway project and link the repository.
3. Railway auto-detects Node.js and runs npm run build followed by npm run start.

Update your package.json start script if needed:

{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "alab build",
    "start": "alab start"
  }
}

Environment variables

Set variables in the Railway dashboard under your service → Variables. Railway automatically injects PORT — AlabJS reads it automatically.

# Railway dashboard variables
NODE_ENV=production
PUBLIC_URL=https://my-app.up.railway.app
DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:pass@host/db
ALAB_REVALIDATE_SECRET=your-secret

Railway also supports reference variables — in the dashboard you can set a variable's value to point at another service's variable (e.g. linking a Postgres plugin's DATABASE_URL directly). See the Railway docs for reference syntax.

Custom domain

Railway provides a .up.railway.app subdomain automatically. To use a custom domain, go to your service → Settings → Domains and add a CNAME record.

Update PUBLIC_URL to match:

PUBLIC_URL=https://yourdomain.com

Dockerfile (optional)

Railway also supports Docker. Use the node:22-alpine Dockerfile from the Node.js deployment guide or the Bun guide — Railway detects a Dockerfile in the root automatically.

Scaling

Railway scales horizontally — add more replicas from the service settings. AlabJS is stateless (ISR cache is in-memory per instance, analytics are per-instance). For shared state across replicas, use an external Redis for the ISR cache.