How does Railway handle environment variables?

Railway treats every variable as encrypted, and you can set them via the CLI or the dashboard.

What should you avoid when deploying with Railway?

Don't deploy as a Railway 'static site'; use the regular service deploy that runs your Dockerfile.

Install — agentsite

Q: What does Railway's Nixpacks builder do?

Railway's Nixpacks builder auto-detects the canonical Dockerfile in the repo root.

[← All integrations](/getting-started)

Install · Verified

# Railway

static shell

Railway's Nixpacks builder auto-detects the canonical Dockerfile. CLI or dashboard env vars; Railway encrypts everything by default.

**Start here first.** Every platform recipe below assumes the canonical Express + Docker install at [/install/express-docker](/install/express-docker). The snippets on this page are the platform-specific deltas on top of that baseline.

Railway's Nixpacks builder auto-detects the canonical `Dockerfile` in the repo root. Set variables via the CLI (or the dashboard); Railway encrypts everything by default.

terminalcopy

```
# 1. Connect repo (Railway auto-detects the Dockerfile via Nixpacks).
railway init
railway link

# 2. Secrets — Railway treats every variable as encrypted.
railway variables set AGENTSITE_TOKEN=asit_xxxxxxxxxxxx
railway variables set AGENTSITE_SITE=https://yoursite.com
railway variables set DIST_DIR=/dist

# 3. Deploy.
railway up
```

**Don't deploy as a Railway "static site."** Railway has a static-deploy mode that skips the runtime — use the regular service deploy that runs your Dockerfile.

[← All integrations](/getting-started#by-hand)  ·  [Need help with this recipe? →](/contact)

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