Railway is an attractive alternative to managed solutions such as Supabase, well suited to users looking for more control without going the full IaaS route.

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Deploying to Railway

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Step 1: Deploy on Railway

Find the PowerSync template on the Railway Marketplace, or click below:

Deploy on Railway

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Step 2: Configure Your Database

  • Create a powersync publication as described in the Source Database Setup section.
    • Optionally filter the publication table list to only include tables that you want clients to download
  • [Optional] Create a Postgres user for PowerSync to use as described in the Source Database Setup section.

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Step 3: Configure Railway and PowerSync

  • Once your project is deployed, clone the repo that Railway created and follow the instructions to generate the JWT config for these environment variables:
    • POWERSYNC_JWT_PRIVATEKEY
    • POWERSYNC_JWT_PUBLICKEY
  • Sign up for a PowerSync account
  • Follow the steps to create a PowerSync instance as documented here: Database Connection
    • Generate a server certificate (in PEM format) via the following command: echo | openssl s_client -showcerts -starttls postgres -connect <host>:<port> -servername <host> 2>/dev/null | sed -n '/BEGIN CERTIFICATE/,/END CERTIFICATE/p' | awk '/BEGIN/{i++}i==2' > railway.pem
    • Replacing <host> and <port> values with your own.
    • In your Dashboard’s connection details form, select “verify-ca” as the SSL mode, and upload the “railway.pem” file into the “Server Certificate” field.
  • Once your instance has been provisioned, copy its instance URL (find the copy icon in the Project tree).
  • Set this as the POWERSYNC_URL environment variable in Railway

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Step 4: Build Out Your Database

This typically consists of the below activities:
  • Create your schema
  • Add any new tables to the powersync publication previously created
  • Load some test data

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Step 5: Build Out Your Backend

See the Node.js backend app for instructions: https://github.com/powersync-ja/powersync-railway-nodejs-template An example implementation using Firebase for auth is available here: https://github.com/powersync-ja/powersync-nodejs-firebase-backend-todolist-demo

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Step 6: Connect Your Client

See these docs for instructions to connect your app to your backend and PowerSync: Client-Side Setup