Concepts

A quick map of the words you’ll see across the dashboard and these docs.

Team

Everything belongs to a team: its servers, apps, databases, cloud credentials and history. Members have a role (viewer, deployer, admin, owner). See Teams, SSO and access.

Server

A server is a machine your apps run on. Either Railyard creates one in your own DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hetzner, AWS or OVH account, or you connect any Ubuntu box over SSH. Either way, Railyard installs Docker, a routing proxy and a small agent that takes instructions from the control plane and runs your containers. You own the server and your provider bills you directly. See Add a server.

A server can also be dedicated to one job: a build server for heavy builds, or a database server that only holds data. See Database servers.

App

An app is one deployable unit: a repository, a Docker image, a static site or a function. Paste a repo URL or pick an image and Railyard reads it to fill in the framework, port, processes and variables. See Deploy from a repository and Deploy a Docker image.

Processes

An app can run several processes from the same image:

• web — answers HTTP traffic, on the port your app listens on.
• workers — background job runners (Sidekiq, Solid Queue, Celery…), scaled independently of web.
• release command — runs once before the new version takes traffic, typically migrations.
• cron — a command run on a schedule, with run history.

See Workers and scheduled jobs.

Add-ons and databases

Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch and more can be provisioned on a server, with credentials injected into the app automatically. See Databases and backups.

Environments

A project groups related apps. An environment (production, staging…) is a full copy of a project, created from the canvas. A pull-request preview is a temporary copy of an app for an open PR, removed when the PR closes. See Environments and previews.

Deploys and releases

A deploy builds (or pulls) an image, runs the release command, then switches traffic to the new version once it’s healthy. Every successful deploy becomes a release you can roll back to. See Deploys and rollbacks.

Domains

Every app gets a working URL out of the box; add your own domain with ownership verification and an automatic certificate. See Domains and HTTPS.