Migrate from Railway
Move a Railway project, its variables, Postgres, and volumes onto InstaCloud.
Railway and InstaCloud think about deployments the same way, so the concepts map almost one to one. A service becomes a compute service, Railway Postgres becomes a postgres service, variables become project secrets, a ${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}} reference becomes a binding, and a volume becomes insta compute volume mounted at /data. This guide takes you from a running Railway project to the same app on InstaCloud, with its data. Your coding agent does most of it.
InstaCloud offers:
- Postgres with real branching. A branch opens as a copy-on-write clone holding all of the parent's data, at its own connection string, so a feature or an agent task can run migrations nowhere near production.
- Built for coding agents. A CLI and an MCP server your agent drives directly, with an approval gate on the actions that matter.
- Flexible deployments. A GitHub repo with no Dockerfile needed, your own Dockerfile, or an image from any registry.
- Managed services alongside. Postgres, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB, and object storage in one project.
- Real support. An active community on Discord.
Migration steps
We will migrate Railway's own Django template, a Python service with a Postgres database. Its railway.json says how it was built. Abridged here: the real startCommand also runs collectstatic:
{
"build": { "builder": "RAILPACK" },
"deploy": { "startCommand": "python manage.py migrate && gunicorn mysite.wsgi" }
}
One code change first. InstaCloud hands Postgres to your app as a single DATABASE_URL. This template reads the five PG* variables Railway injects instead, so point it at the DSN before you start. In Django that is dj-database-url, and most other stacks take a DSN directly.
1. Point a coding agent at your Railway project
Your agent reads the project straight from Railway's API, so it needs your repo name and a project token, not a checkout. Give it the skill first:
npx -y insta@latest agent setup
That installs the insta CLI, the insta skill, and the MCP server for every coding agent on this machine. The skill is what knows how a Railway project maps onto services here.
2. Create a project
insta project create mysite
Or click Create Project in the console. A new project starts empty.
3. Ask your agent to migrate
Create a Railway project token first, under Project Settings → Tokens. Railway's CLI picks a project interactively otherwise, and your agent cannot answer a picker.
Migrate my Railway service mysite and its Postgres data to InstaCloud. The repo is railwayapp-templates/django, and my Railway project token is in RAILWAY_TOKEN. Follow the insta skill's migration runbook, and stop before sending traffic to it.
It will ask you to approve anything that touches production, and it will hand two jobs back to you, because Railway has no command for either. Order matters. If you have a volume, download it first, while its service is still running, because Railway refuses to read a volume whose service is stopped. Only then scale every service to zero, workers and cron services included, so nothing is still writing when the database is copied.
Leave the Railway project frozen rather than deleted, so you can go back to it.
Limitations
A few things are not here yet. Limitations covers the ones people hit most, and is worth the minute before you commit. Stuck anywhere? Come to Discord.