Deploy Shipfastai to Railway and Vercel

Railway and Vercel together give you a production-grade deployment with managed infrastructure, automatic TLS, and preview environments — without configuring servers. Railway hosts your FastAPI backend and PostgreSQL database, and Vercel hosts your Next.js frontend. This guide walks you through both deployments and explains how to wire them together.

Railway’s free Hobby plan is suitable for experimenting, but it imposes usage limits and may sleep inactive services. For a real production workload, upgrade to Railway’s Pro plan ($20/month) to get always-on services, more compute, and priority support.

Deploy the backend to Railway

Create a Railway project and add a PostgreSQL database

Log in to railway.app and create a new project. Inside the project, click New → Database → Add PostgreSQL. Railway provisions a managed PostgreSQL instance and automatically injects a DATABASE_URL variable into services in the same project.

Connect your GitHub repo and select the backend directory

Click New → GitHub Repo, authorize Railway to access your repository, and select it. In the service settings, set the Root Directory to the backend path for your tier:

Basic: products/basic/backend
Pro: products/pro/backend
Enterprise: products/enterprise/backend

Railway detects the Dockerfile in that directory and uses it for builds.

Set required environment variables

In the service’s Variables tab, add the following. DATABASE_URL is already injected by the linked PostgreSQL service — do not override it.

Variable	Description
`JWT_SECRET`	A long, random string used to sign JWT tokens
`STRIPE_SECRET_KEY`	Your Stripe secret key (`sk_live_...`)
`STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET`	Stripe webhook signing secret (`whsec_...`)
`STRIPE_PRICE_ID_MONTHLY`	Stripe price ID for the monthly plan
`STRIPE_PRICE_ID_YEARLY`	Stripe price ID for the yearly plan
`RESEND_API_KEY`	Resend API key for transactional email
`FROM_EMAIL`	Sender address for outgoing email
`FRONTEND_URL`	Your Vercel frontend URL (set after frontend is deployed)
`CORS_ORIGINS`	Same as `FRONTEND_URL`
`APP_ENV`	Set to `production`
`DEBUG`	Set to `false`

Configure the start command

In the service settings under Deploy, set the Start Command to:

uvicorn app.main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT

Railway injects the $PORT variable automatically. Do not hardcode a port number.

Deploy and note the backend URL

Click Deploy. Railway builds the Docker image and starts the service. Once the deployment is healthy, open the Settings tab and copy the public domain (e.g. https://your-project-production.up.railway.app). You will need this URL when setting up the frontend.

Deploy the frontend to Vercel

Connect your GitHub repo to Vercel

Log in to vercel.com, click Add New Project, and import your GitHub repository. Vercel detects the monorepo structure automatically.

Set the root directory

In the project configuration, expand Root Directory and set it to the frontend path for your tier:

Basic: products/basic/frontend
Pro: products/pro/frontend
Enterprise: products/enterprise/frontend

Vercel uses this directory as the build context and automatically detects Next.js.

Set environment variables

Before deploying, add the following environment variables in the Vercel dashboard under Settings → Environment Variables:

Variable	Value
`NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL`	Your Railway backend URL from the previous section
`NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_PRICE_ID_MONTHLY`	Stripe monthly price ID
`NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_PRICE_ID_YEARLY`	Stripe yearly price ID

Variables prefixed with NEXT_PUBLIC_ are embedded into the browser bundle at build time, so you must redeploy after changing them.

Deploy

Click Deploy. Vercel builds the Next.js application and publishes it to its global edge network. Once deployment succeeds, Vercel assigns a .vercel.app domain you can use immediately or replace with a custom domain.

Custom domain setup

You can add a custom domain in both services from their respective dashboards.

Railway: Go to your service → Settings → Networking → Custom Domain. Add your domain and update your DNS records as instructed.
Vercel: Go to your project → Settings → Domains. Add your domain and follow the DNS verification steps.

After pointing your custom domain to the backend, update the FRONTEND_URL and CORS_ORIGINS variables on Railway, and redeploy the backend. After pointing your custom domain to the frontend, update NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL on Vercel and redeploy the frontend.

Environment variable checklist

Use this table to confirm every variable is configured in the right service before going live.

Variable	Set on Railway	Set on Vercel
`DATABASE_URL`	Auto-injected	—
`JWT_SECRET`	Yes	—
`STRIPE_SECRET_KEY`	Yes	—
`STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET`	Yes	—
`STRIPE_PRICE_ID_MONTHLY`	Yes	—
`STRIPE_PRICE_ID_YEARLY`	Yes	—
`RESEND_API_KEY`	Yes	—
`FROM_EMAIL`	Yes	—
`FRONTEND_URL`	Yes	—
`CORS_ORIGINS`	Yes	—
`APP_ENV`	Yes	—
`NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL`	—	Yes
`NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_PRICE_ID_MONTHLY`	—	Yes
`NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_PRICE_ID_YEARLY`	—	Yes

Documentation Index

​Deploy the backend to Railway

​Deploy the frontend to Vercel

​Custom domain setup

​Environment variable checklist

Deploy the backend to Railway

Deploy the frontend to Vercel

Custom domain setup

Environment variable checklist