8 months ago
I have a project where a Neon some, but not all, of the services need access to a Neon database.
What is the "Railway way" of adding external dependencies?
I'm considering creating a empty service, put the Neon connection string in that, and then use reference variables in the services that needs to have access to the database.
Pinned Solution
8 months ago
That's a good idea, though you don't need to create an empty service to do that, there is already a feature for exactly this kind of use-case called shared variables. It lets you define a variable on the project-scope* that any service can access (*with project scope, i really mean project environment scope, but you get the idea)
So in your case you'll want to add the Neon database connection URL as a shared variable
You can read more shared variables here: https://docs.railway.com/guides/variables#shared-variables
3 Replies
8 months ago
That's a good idea, though you don't need to create an empty service to do that, there is already a feature for exactly this kind of use-case called shared variables. It lets you define a variable on the project-scope* that any service can access (*with project scope, i really mean project environment scope, but you get the idea)
So in your case you'll want to add the Neon database connection URL as a shared variable
You can read more shared variables here: https://docs.railway.com/guides/variables#shared-variables
8 months ago
Thanks!
I'll take that approach! I can see that it also make it easy to have different environments with different variables.
Though, I do find it cool to have the visual representation that includes a database.
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8 months ago
That's fair, if you like the visual representation then an empty service is completely fine, either way should work for your use-case
Status changed to Solved brody • 9 months ago