November 2022 Summaries

Shared Variables is a new feature in Railway that allows developers to define secrets in a centralized place and consume them across multiple services, making it easier to ship microservice and monorepo projects. It can be accessed from Project Settings or the Variables tab within a service's settings, and shared variables can be promoted from service-level variables to project-level shared variables. This feature exposes shared variables to Railway's template engine under the `shared.*` namespace, allowing developers to create complex references to these variables in their code, such as referencing a GraphQL URL with a variable that includes the domain and path of the shared variable.

Config as Code allows you to specify service build and deploy settings in a file alongside your code, which can be a railway.toml or railway.json file by default or a custom file specified in the service settings. This approach brings the power of git to your service build and deploy configuration, allowing for version control, rollback, and easy management of different environments with similar configurations. It also enables custom start commands per environment, separate config per environment, and reproducibility for shared projects. By using Config as Code, you can incorporate settings at your own convenience and track them in Git, ensuring determinism for your collaborators.