Are there any errors? Any signs telling you it's not running locally?

Keep in mind that for railway link, you need to have a project in your account linked to the current directory to be able to pull variables from it.

Nope, it just spin up my Next.js web app

could you explain?

This is currently Strapi settings

Well, yes. railway run pulls environment variables from the specified service and runs the command locally. (Read railway help and railway run -h)

If you want to run Strapi locally, you'd need to clone the repository to your machine, configure the required variables and dependencies, then railway link, then railway run to run the project locally.

So I need to eject upstream repository? What if upstream repository has updates?

I did not say eject.

Running Strapi locally has nothing to do with the upstream service in Railway. The only thing railway run does is give you access to the variables inside your Railway service.

Hmm alright, i'll try

Can't seem to run https://github.com/railwayapp-templates/strapi

Did you follow the instructions in README.md?

yup