标签：#railway

This post contains Railway referral links. If you sign up through one I get a bit of credit. I build Old Light , a real-time strategy game that runs in the browser. Claim stars, grow an economy, send fleets, all while other players and NPC empires do the same. The second a build finishes or a fleet lands, the server pushes it to every connected client over a WebSocket. That last part, a long-lived server holding an open socket, rules out most of the usual hosts. Here's what it ruled in. Why not Vercel or Netlify Serverless shines when your backend is stateless functions. It's the wrong shape the moment you need a socket that stays open: socket.io wants one process that lives for the whole session, and serverless boots per request and then freezes. You can bolt on a managed WebSocket service, but that's a second system to run and pay for. Railway runs your service as a normal long-lived process, so socket.io just connects. Fly.io does this too with more knobs to turn. I wanted to ship, so Railway won. Monorepo, two services Old Light is an npm workspaces monorepo: a shared types package, an Express plus TypeORM plus socket.io API, and a Vite web app served by a small Express server. On Railway that's two services on the same repo, each with its own root directory and build command, shared built first. They deploy as separate origins, so the web app reads the API's URL from VITE_API_URL . Vite bakes that in at build time, so it's a build variable, not a runtime one. Postgres is a plugin that injects DATABASE_URL , and production runs migrations rather than synchronize . WebSockets need nothing special until you run more than one instance, at which point you'd add a Redis socket.io adapter. I haven't left a single box yet. A healthcheck that stops version skew Two services don't go live at the same instant. Push a commit that touches both, the web finishes first, and for a minute your new frontend is calling API routes that don't exist yet. It 404s, then heals itself o