Is Postgres high availability available on Pro, and how is it provisioned?
midday-visions
PROOP

a month ago

We run four production Postgres databases on Railway (Pro workspace) and are

about to consolidate them into one. Today a Postgres failure affects one

customer; afterwards it would affect all of them, so we want replication and

failover in place before the migration rather than after.

Before asking, we checked what we could from the public GraphQL API:

  • enablePitrForHaCluster / disablePitrForHaCluster exist
  • pitrHaClusterReplicationHealth(environmentId, rootServiceId) exists
  • cancelPitrHaWorkflow / pitrHaWorkflowProgress exist

So "Postgres HA cluster" is clearly a concept in the platform, but we can't

find any mutation that CREATES one, and templateSearch returns nothing for

"postgres ha" or "postgres high availability". Our existing Postgres services

report no replicas and pitrHaClusterReplicationHealth does not resolve for them.

Questions:

  1. Is Postgres high availability (streaming replica + failover) available on the

    Pro plan? If so, how is it provisioned — dashboard flow, template, or via

    support?

  2. If it is not self-serve, is it on the roadmap, or is it an Enterprise

    feature?

  3. We already have WAL archiving / PITR enabled and healthy on all four

    databases (archive_mode=on, zero archive failures). Can PITR restore into a

    NEW service, and roughly how long does a restore take for a ~1 GB database?

    We're trying to decide whether a fast, proven restore is an acceptable

    substitute for failover at our scale.

  4. To be explicit about something we want to avoid getting wrong: the Pro plan

    limit shows deploys.replicas = 42. We're assuming that is stateless service

    replicas and must NOT be used to scale a Postgres service backed by a single

    volume. Please confirm.

Happy to share project IDs privately if that helps.

Solved$20 Bounty

Pinned Solution

a month ago

1 and 2 Yes, It is available and self-serve, You can enable it on the Dashboard

Open your Postgres service, Go to the Database > Config, Click "Convert to HA" on the High Availability section

3 Restoring from PITR will always create a new Postgres service, I just tried restoring a dummy 1GB database and it takes around 1 minute (RTO until the restore complete)

4 Yes, and Replicas is disabled for volume-attached service

4 Replies

Railway
BOT

a month ago

This thread has been opened as a bounty so the community can help solve it.

Status changed to Open Railway • about 1 month ago


turicamirabelamaria-art
PRO

a month ago

Yes. PostgreSQL High Availability is available on Railway, including Pro.

As of March 27, 2026, Railway states that HA Postgres is available to all users.

An existing PostgreSQL service can be converted into a highly available cluster with automatic failover.

Railway provisions the HA topology behind the scenes using:

PostgreSQL replicas managed by Patroni

etcd for leader election

HAProxy to route traffic to the current primary

If the primary fails, a replica is promoted and traffic is rerouted automatically.

Railway’s current PostgreSQL documentation explicitly confirms that an existing PostgreSQL service can be converted to HA rather than requiring you to build the cluster manually.

In the UI, the HA conversion is exposed from the PostgreSQL database configuration/settings area under High Availability.

Sources:

Railway PostgreSQL docs — High Availability

Railway Changelog, March 27 2026 — HA Postgres available to all users


a month ago

1 and 2 Yes, It is available and self-serve, You can enable it on the Dashboard

Open your Postgres service, Go to the Database > Config, Click "Convert to HA" on the High Availability section

3 Restoring from PITR will always create a new Postgres service, I just tried restoring a dummy 1GB database and it takes around 1 minute (RTO until the restore complete)

4 Yes, and Replicas is disabled for volume-attached service


mayori

1 and 2 Yes, It is available and self-serve, You can enable it on the Dashboard Open your Postgres service, Go to the Database > Config, Click "Convert to HA" on the High Availability section 3 Restoring from PITR will always create a new Postgres service, I just tried restoring a dummy 1GB database and it takes around 1 minute (RTO until the restore complete) 4 Yes, and Replicas is disabled for volume-attached service

midday-visions
PROOP

a month ago

Does converting to HA change the connection string? HAProxy fronts the primary, so I want to know whether DATABASE_URL needs to point at the proxy rather than the old host after conversion. Thanks


midday-visions

Does converting to HA change the connection string? HAProxy fronts the primary, so I want to know whether DATABASE_URL needs to point at the proxy rather than the old host after conversion. Thanks

a month ago

Yes, the database url needs to point to the proxy, but if your project uses referenced variable to your postgres database url, Railway will automatically point it to the proxy

https://docs.railway.com/databases/postgresql-ha#step-3--connection-strings


Status changed to Solved brody • about 1 month ago


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