A developer migrated a multi-tenant Rails app (5 hospitals, 25K+ appointments) from Heroku to Railway in about an hour. The post covers the full process: capturing and restoring a Postgres database, handling the heroku_ext schema extension issue, an accidental incident where running 'railway up' without --service replaced the Postgres container with a Rails web server, DNS configuration for wildcard subdomains, fixing a RACK_ENV misconfiguration, and a pricing comparison showing Railway is slightly cheaper. Key lessons include always verifying row counts after restores, always specifying --service in Railway CLI commands, and being aware of Railway's trial plan limitations. The post also includes a fair warning about reported performance and reliability issues on Railway for larger workloads.
Table of contents
The setupThe database restoreThe moment I broke the databaseFlipping the domainOne more thing: RACK_ENVTrial plan limitationsPricingWhat I also didThings I’d tell myself before startingFair warningWas it worth it?Sort: