Using Railway private networking
Railway (mandatory referral link) has 2 different networking systems:
- a public network
- a private network
The public network gives you a public URL that can be referenced from anywhere.
The private network is a URL that’s private, internal to Railway.
The big benefit of the private network is that a service is inherently more secure if not accessible through the public Internet if not needed.
But on top of that, you got this huge advantage: using the private network does not have a cost, while public network incurs in egress fees ($0.10 / GB).
So by using the private network things are more secure, and cheaper to host.
For a while I had trouble using Railway’s (and Fly.io’s) private networking to connect my app with PocketBase but eventually I discovered the problem and since this might be something you can stumble upon too, let me explain.
When using the public network, you get a URL like
<custom_subdomain>.up.railway.app
In your app, you connect to this using
https://<the url>
With private networking you get a URL like this:
<custom_subdomain>.railway.internal
In your app, you must use the PORT as well. This is the internal port exposed by your Docker container.
In my case I used 8080
, so I had to use this URL in my app:
<custom_subdomain>.railway.internal:8080
Super important: use http://
and NOT https://
or the internal network will not work.
You typically use variable references on Railway to avoid hardcoding the variables, so you can write your variables as something like:
POCKETBASE_URL=http://${{pocketbase.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:${{pocketbase.PORT}}
assuming PORT
was defined as a PocketBase service variable on Railway.
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