10 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
10 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
10 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
10 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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10 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 • 10 months ago