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Version: v2.x

Connecting Hasura to a Railway Postgres Database

Introduction

This guide explains how to connect a new or existing Railway Postgres database to a Hasura instance, either on Hasura Cloud or via one of our self-hosted solutions. If you're exploring Railway Postgres and are interested in migrating an existing Postgres database - such as from Heroku - check out their docs before continuing below.

Note

If you plan on using Hasura Cloud, which we recommend, follow steps 1 and 2 below. If you're self-hosting a Hasura instance and already have a project running, skip to step 3.

Step 1: Sign up or log in to Hasura Cloud

Navigate to Hasura Cloud and sign up or log in.

Step 2: Create a Hasura Cloud project

On the Hasura Cloud dashboard, create a new project:

Create Hasura Cloud project

After the project is initialized successfully, click on Launch Console to open the Hasura Console in your browser.

On the Hasura Console, navigate to the Data tab and choose Connect Existing Database. Hasura will prompt you for a Postgres Database URL. We'll create this in the next step and then come back here.

Hasura Cloud database setup

Step 3: Create a Postgres DB on Railway

Log into Railway.

From your dashboard, click New Project:

Create a new project with Railway

Select Provision PostgreSQL:

Create a new PG db with Railway

Railway will redirect you to the project's dashboard. After a few seconds, you should see the Activity card update with information about your new instance. Congratulations! You've now created a Postgres instance on Railway which you can use with Hasura GraphQL Engine. Follow the steps below to connect it to Hasura.

Step 4: Get the database connection URL

The structure of the database connection URL looks as follows:

postgresql://<user-name>:<password>@<host-server>:<port>/<database-name>

Click on the PostgreSQL card to see details related to this instance.

Access your the details of the db from the card

Choose the Connect tab and copy the Postgres Connection URL:

Go to the connect tab and grab the connection string

Step 5: Finish connecting the database

Back on the Hasura Console, enter the database URL that we retrieved in the previous step:

Connect the database on Hasura Console

Then click Connect Database.

Note

For security reasons, it is recommended to set database URLs as env vars and using the env vars to connect to the databases in place of the raw database URLs.

Voilà. You are ready to start developing.

Hasura Console

Next steps

Project actions
Note

For more information on which Postgres features we support, check out this page.