Railway doesn't have docker-compose support, you'd need to separate each item in the docker-compose file into its own service

For example, let's say you have a docker-compose file like this:

version: '3.8'
services:
  mongodb:
    image: mongo:latest
    container_name: mongodb
    environment:
      - MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_USERNAME=admin
      - MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_PASSWORD=secretpassword
    ports:
      - "27017:27017"
    volumes:
      - mongodb_data:/data/db
    networks:
      - app_network
  app:
    build: 
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    container_name: myapp
    environment:
      - MONGODB_URI=mongodb://admin:secretpassword@mongodb:27017/mydb
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    depends_on:
      - mongodb
    networks:
      - app_network
volumes:
  mongodb_data:
networks:
  app_network:
    driver: bridge

In this case you'll notice we have a mongodb service and an app service. The way you'd get this to work on Railway would be something like this:

1. Create a project ( akin to networks: app_network: driver: bridge )

2. Right Click -> Database -> MongoDB ( akin to services: mongodb: ... and adds the volume and environment variables automatically )

3. Right Click -> GitHub/Docker -> Your Application's Source ( akin to services: app: ... )

4. Add the environment variables to your application, in this case PORT=3000 and MONGODB_URI, you can do this using shared variables and private networking

And then you'd have translated that docker-compose over to a Railway project

Thanks for the guidance. I've deployed services separately and added a custom start command. while all three services seem to be up and running, the public-url provided by Railway does not work for me with message: "502 Bad Gateway Application failed to respond, this error appears to be caused by the application". I attached 8000 as port number for my service to run on

Could you try setting an service variable called PORT and set it to 8000 ?

The target port has been always there, the problem was me not adding an endpoint to get to the server admin page. Now to run these services together, I need to run a pre-deployment and a start command like "docker network create app_network

"
Deployment is failing because of that, I wonder if I have to install a docker executable during image build or is there any thoughts around that?

You don't need to create any docker networks, all the services under a project is already connected under a private network. See: https://docs.railway.com/guides/private-networking

When I go this route, I get connection refused message in the service logs, the error I never get when I've set up docker network locally

Make sure you're using http when using the private network, and also you have to specify the port your service is running on, meaning if your app's name is "example" and its running on port 3000 then you'd connect to it via http://example.railway.internal:3000, also make sure the service is listening for IPv6 connections, most web-frameworks I know of does dualbind to both IPv6 and IPv4 but some don't, so make sure yours do