Deploy on Railway

Railway builds and runs the studio in a container without you writing a Dockerfile. It sits between Vercel (fully managed, opinionated) and Fly (VM, more control) in complexity.

What you get

Automatic detection of Next.js; builds via Nixpacks.
Deploys on push, with per-branch environments.
Managed HTTPS on a .up.railway.app subdomain.
Environment variables in the dashboard.
A generous free tier for testing.

Steps

1. Create a Railway project

Sign in to Railway with GitHub.
Click New Project > Deploy from GitHub repo.
Select the studio repository.
Railway detects Next.js and configures build/start automatically.

2. Set environment variables

Open the service, go to the Variables tab, and add:

Name	Value
`SESSION_SECRET`	64 hex chars, `openssl rand -hex 32`
`META_API_BASE`	`https://api.facebook.com`
`GRAPH_API_BASE`	`https://graph.facebook.com/v20.0`
`META_APP_SECRET`	your Meta app secret (only if using webhooks)
`META_WEBHOOK_VERIFY_TOKEN`	any random string (only if using webhooks)

Railway injects a PORT variable automatically; the studio honors it via start.sh.

3. Deploy

The first deploy triggers automatically. Expect 3 to 5 minutes.

4. Generate a public URL

Railway does not expose a public URL by default. In the service's Settings > Networking, click Generate Domain. You get a URL like https://studio-production.up.railway.app.

5. Confirm

Open the URL. Click Try the demo. If the demo works end-to-end, real Meta traffic will too.

Custom domain

Settings > Networking > Custom Domain. Add your domain, follow the DNS instructions. HTTPS is automatic.

Rolling back

Deployments tab shows every build. Click a previous one and Redeploy. Railway spins up the old build immediately.

Scaling

Railway's Hobby plan runs one instance. For higher tiers, use the Replicas control in the service settings to run multiple. Because the studio is stateless per request, replicas are safe.

Vertical scaling (RAM, CPU) is available under the same tab.

Common issues

"Cannot find module" during build. Railway's Nixpacks caches Node modules aggressively. Trigger a clean build by clicking Deploy and selecting No cache under the three-dot menu.

Cookies not being set. Confirm you are visiting the HTTPS URL, not HTTP. Railway serves both; the studio's session cookie only sets on HTTPS in production.

Meta webhook 403 on verification. Point Meta at your Railway URL, not the internal Railway host. Public URL only.

Random request failures at ~5 seconds. You are on the Hobby plan and hitting the sleep timer. Move to a paid plan or accept the cold starts.

Observability

Service Deployments > Logs: live streaming logs.
Metrics: CPU, memory, network, request rate.

The studio emits stdout only. See Architecture and security for what is and is not logged.