One-Second Deploys? We Didn’t Believe It Either

Railway has launched Railway Functions, a new feature enabling sub-5-second deploys of TypeScript/JavaScript code without needing a package manager, GitHub repo, IaC, or container builds. The motivation came from the painful experience of spending hours setting up AWS Lambda and EventBridge for a simple cron script. Functions work by parsing source code into an AST to auto-generate a package.json, installing dependencies via Bun (up to 10x faster than npm/pnpm/yarn), and running code directly without transpilation. The feature is now generally available and supports TypeScript out of the box, with more language support planned.