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Laravel on Railway

Railway publishes its own guide for deploying Laravel.

PHP web framework with an ORM, queue workers and a scheduler that expects a persistent process.

01.

What Laravel needs.

Every host claims to run Laravel, so the claim on its own decides nothing. These are the things Laravel actually requires from the platform underneath it, and what Railway publishes about each. Railway documents 4 of the 4.

Persistent processes

Supported

Queue workers and Horizon are long-running processes, not requests. They have to stay up between jobs.

Sources (1) →
  • Services — Railway Docs ↗

    “Persistent services: Services that are always running. Examples include web applications, backend APIs, message queues, database services, etc.”

    Read 2026-09-05 · official docs

Managed databases

Limited

Eloquent, migrations and the default session and cache drivers all expect a relational database.

Sources (1) →
  • Databases — Railway Docs ↗

    “Railway enables you to deploy and manage databases alongside your applications. [...] The fastest way to deploy a database is through Railway's database templates [...] These templates are maintained by Railway and come pre-configured with sensible defaults.”

    Read 2026-09-05 · official docs

Scheduled jobs

Supported

Laravel's scheduler is one cron entry calling schedule:run every minute. Without cron, nothing scheduled ever fires.

Sources (1) →
  • Cron Jobs | Railway Docs ↗

    “Cron Jobs allow you to start a service based on a crontab expression. [...] The shortest time between successive executions of a cron job cannot be less than 5 minutes.”

    Read 2026-09-05 · official docs

Persistent storage

Supported

The default filesystem disk writes uploads under storage/app. On an ephemeral filesystem those files disappear at the next deploy.

Sources (1) →
  • Volumes | Railway Docs ↗

    “Volumes are a feature that enables persistent data for services on Railway. [...] When mounting a volume to a service, a volume is made available to the service on the specified mount path.”

    Read 2026-09-05 · official docs

The requirement and the reason it matters are ours. Every value beside them was read from Railway's own pages — expand a source to see the sentence it came from.

02.

What Railway documents.

Railway publishes its own guide for deploying Laravel.

This guide covers how to deploy a Laravel app on Railway in three ways.

Sources (1) →
03.

What it costs to run there.

Entry paid plan
$5 / month (Hobby)
Pricing model
Plan fee that includes an equivalent usage credit
When you exceed a cap
Billed automatically: on the Hobby plan ($5/month, includes $5 of resource usage) usage above the included amount is charged as a delta on top of the subscription — no throttling or suspension is documented
Regions
4 regions: California, Virginia, Amsterdam, Singapore
Sources (3) →
  • Railway plans ↗

    “Hobby Plan: For indie hackers and developers to build and deploy personal projects — $5/month”

    Read 2026-09-05 · official docs

  • Pricing Plans | Railway Docs ↗

    “If your total resource usage exceeds $5 in any given billing period, you will be charged the delta”

    Read 2026-09-05 · official docs

  • Railway regions ↗

    “US West Metal — California, USA; US East Metal — Virginia, USA; EU West Metal — Amsterdam, Netherlands; Southeast Asia Metal — Singapore”

    Read 2026-09-05 · official docs

04.

Whether it suits you.

Teams that want a plan fee which doubles as usage credit, and deploy services straight from a Dockerfile without managing servers. The $5 Hobby fee comes back as $5 of resource usage.

Consider something else if…

You need to run in a region outside California, Virginia, Amsterdam or Singapore.

Written by Palash Bagchi on 2026-09-05. This is a recommendation, not a sourced fact — it carries no citation because it is an opinion.

Visit Railway documentation