How to host blazor on railway app

A quick guide on how to host a blazor website on railway.app

0. Prerequisites

• Github account
• Railway.app account
• A cup of water (stay hydrated)

1. Prepare the C# project

For this guide we’re gonna be using docker, if you don’t know what that is or how to use it then don’t worry since it’s very easy.

Note: I’ll be using my own Portfolio project as an example here

1. Create a file in the root directory of your project and name it Dockerfile

2. Open the file and paste this

    # Build stage
    FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:7.0 AS build
    WORKDIR /source
    COPY . .
    RUN dotnet restore "src/Portfolio/Portfolio.csproj" --disable-parallel
    RUN dotnet publish "src/Portfolio/Portfolio.csproj" -c release -o /app --no-restore

    # Serve stage
    FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:7.0
    WORKDIR /app
    COPY --from=build /app ./

    ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", "Portfolio.dll"]

• Note 1: code snippet borrowed from here
• Note 2: set the .net version to the version you’re using
• Note 3: replace the csproj path to the relative path of your csproj and rename Portfolio.dll to the name of your csproj

1. Push your changes to github

2. Creating a railway project

Their UI is a bit goofy but bear with me

1. Go to Railway.app and click on Start a New Project

2. Choose Empty Project and you should get a window like this

3. Click on the button in the middle Add a service and choose Empty service

4. Click on it again and a side bar should come up, here we can configure our project before deploying it

5. Click on Variables > Raw Editor and paste these in there then press Update variables

PORT=80
ASPNETCORE_HTTP_PORT=https://+:81
ASPNETCORE_URLS=http://+:80

• these variables will allow our project to be accessible to the internet

1. Go to Settings and click on Genrate Domain (or Custom Domain if you own one)
   • if you did generate a domain you can rename it by clicking on the edit icon

2. Scroll down and give your service a fancy name

3. And finally click on Connect Repo and choose the project you want to host, give it a second or two to build then done your project should be ready

Now you can use the domain you set earlier to access your site

3. End Notes

Now that your website is ready you may want to fiddle a bit with the railway website so here are some easy things you can do:

Dashboard

• If you click on the website’s logo top left it will bring you to the dashboard page, here you can see all your projects and can make new ones.

Project

• Each project on railway can consist of multiple apps (or services), so for example you can click on the project that contains your website then add a new database or even another website

• In a project page you can see a summary of it’s activities if you click on the Activity tab bottom right

• You can update the project’s settings if you click on the Settings button top right

  • In the General tab you can edit the project’s name, description and visibility (i’d love if they give you a pop up to edit these before creating the project)
  • In the Members tab you can invite people to work with you on the project

Service

• If you click on a service you can monitor it and change it’s options
  • The Deployments tab allow you yo see the deployments you did and read the logs if you click on View Logs
  • The Variables tab allow you to configure the environment variables
  • The Metrics tab allow you to see your service’s cpu/memory/network usage

And that’s all, thanks for reading and enjoy your website :D