How to deploy Rails 8 + Hotwire apps on Railway

jtmst — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:45:10 +0000

Rails 8 and Hotwire make real-time UI updates incredibly simple, but deploying them usually means wiring up Redis, Postgres, Action Cable, and Rails yourself. We can use the Railway template system to simplify all of that and get up and running faster.

Use this template to deploy to railway

What you get:
The template above spins up three services

Rails 8.1 with Turbo Streams and Stimulus
PostgreSQL
Redis for Action Cable pub/sub

This template pre-wires everything together. ENV variables and networking have already been configured, along with Tailwind and a working broadcast demo so you can see how Hotwire works with streams right away.

Deploy Steps:

Click this deploy button
Sign in or create Railway account
Wait for build (2ish minutes)
Click the generated URL

To test the broadcast functionality, open the link in two separate browser tabs. Enter a message in one tab, and see that it instantly displays in the other tab without refresh.

This is the power of Turbo streams. A relatively simple config allows the server to broadcast HTML to every connected client

How to customize:
The template here is just the basic wiring. To customize and get started on your own real time application you'll want to fork, clone, and build on top of it:

Fork the source repo
Clone it locally
Make your changes and customizations
Push to your fork
Connect railway to your repo and deploy

Use cases:
If you're new to Rails or Hotwire, here are some project types well-suited for this template

Real-time dashboards
Chat features
Live notifications
Collaborative/Multiplayer UIs

Links

DEV Community: jtmst

How to deploy Rails 8 + Hotwire apps on Railway