environment_skill

Overview

This skill manages Railway environment configuration: inspect current config, stage and apply changes, and modify variables, build/deploy settings, and service wiring. It supports querying rendered or raw variables, duplicating or switching environments, and committing staged changes for immediate or deferred deployment. Use it to programmatically control environment-level settings and service-scale parameters.

How this skill works

The skill queries Railway for project and environment context (railway status --json) then fetches full environment config and any staged patch via GraphQL. It stages changes with environmentStageChanges (mergeable) and can commit immediately with environmentPatchCommit or apply all staged changes with environmentPatchCommitStaged. For runtime values it uses the CLI variables command to return rendered variables.

When to use it

• User asks “what's the config”, “show configuration”, or “what variables are set”
• Add, update, or delete environment or service variables
• Change service source (image, repo, branch, root dir) or build/start commands
• Create, duplicate, or switch environments; connect a GitHub repo
• Change replica counts, health checks, or delete a service/volume/bucket
• Stage multiple changes and then apply or apply a single change immediately

Best practices

• Always run railway status --json first to get project and environment IDs
• When running GraphQL via bash, wrap API calls in a heredoc to avoid shell escaping problems
• Use variables in GraphQL mutations (not inline object keys) because service IDs are UUIDs
• Use merge: true when staging incremental changes to avoid overwriting staged patches
• Default behavior is to deploy on commit; only set skipDeploys when user explicitly requests it

Example use cases

• Show full environment configuration including per-service variables and shared variables
• Add an API key to a specific service and commit immediately to deploy
• Duplicate production to staging and adjust service PORT variables during creation
• Stage multiple build and deploy changes across services, then apply them together
• Increase a service replica count and commit with a short commit message