Migrate from Railway

A Railway project maps closely onto a Zenavo project: services, private networking, shared variables and volumes all have counterparts.

How Railway maps to Zenavo

Railway	Zenavo
Project and environment	A project on one server; another environment is a cloned project
Service from GitHub	A service from GitHub, redeployed on push
Nixpacks or Railpack build	zbpack, or your Dockerfile
Start command, healthcheck path (railway.json)	Startup command and an HTTP health check
Reference variables ${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}	Shared variables, such as ${POSTGRESQL_CONNECTION_STRING} (Environment Variables)
<service>.railway.internal	<hostname>.zenavo.internal (Private Networking)
Volumes	Volumes
Watch paths	Watch paths
Replicas	Replicas, on one server
Cron schedule	No scheduled jobs yet: run a worker service with a scheduler in the app

1. Rebuild the services

1. Add a server and create a project.
2. Add the databases first (Databases), then each app service from Add Service → GitHub, with the same root directory.
3. Copy each service's start command and healthcheck path from Railway's settings or railway.json into the service's Settings.

2. Copy the variables

Railway's Raw Editor on a service's Variables shows them as KEY=value lines; paste them under Variable → Edit Raw Variables. Replace reference variables with Zenavo's shared ones: ${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}} becomes ${POSTGRESQL_CONNECTION_STRING}, and ${{api.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}} becomes api.zenavo.internal.

3. Move the data

For PostgreSQL, dump through the database's public URL (DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL on Railway) as plain SQL, with the same major version on Zenavo:

pg_dump --no-owner --no-acl "$DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL" | gzip > railway.sql.gz

Upload it under the new database's Backup & Restore tab and restore it into the empty database (Uploading a backup). For MySQL, use mysqldump the same way.

For a volume, copy its files out (for example with tar from a shell in the Railway service), then upload them with the service's Files tile, or restore an uncompressed .tar into an empty volume (Backup & Restore).

4. Switch the domain

Bind each domain under Networking, then replace Railway's CNAME with an A record to the server's IP address (Domains & HTTPS).