templates_skill

Overview

This skill manages searching and deploying services from Railway's template marketplace. Use it to add pre-configured services (Ghost, Strapi, n8n, Minio, Uptime Kuma, etc.) or to find templates tailored to a use case. It returns template metadata, serialized configuration, and performs template deployments into a project environment.

How this skill works

The skill queries Railway's templates API to list templates or fetch a specific template by code, returning id and serializedConfig needed for deployment. It then calls the template deploy mutation with project, environment, and workspace context to create services, volumes, and environment variables. After deployment, use reference variables to wire services together (for example, ${Service.VARIABLE_NAME}).

When to use it

• You want to add a pre-configured service like Ghost, Strapi, Minio, or Uptime Kuma
• You need a database template (Postgres, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB) — note: prefer the database skill for DB-specific workflows
• You want to find templates for a use case (CMS, storage, monitoring, automation)
• You need to deploy a verified or recommended template quickly into an existing project
• You want reproducible, pre-configured environment setup without manual container/service configuration

Best practices

• Run railway status --json first to get project and environment IDs before any API calls
• Fetch the template (id and serializedConfig) and pass the serializedConfig as a JSON object (not a string) when deploying
• Respect the templates search rate limit (10 requests per minute) and use filters (verified, recommended) to narrow results
• Prefer database-specific skill for detailed DB management; use this skill for generic templated services and apps
• Use environment reference variables to securely connect services; route frontend access through a backend when using private variables

Example use cases

• Add a PostgreSQL service quickly using the postgres template and wire other services to ${Postgres.DATABASE_URL}
• Search verified CMS templates to pick between Ghost and Strapi for a content project
• Deploy n8n from a template to provision a workflow engine with recommended environment variables and storage
• Spin up Minio for S3-compatible object storage in a project and connect an app via the provided public URL variable
• Deploy Uptime Kuma to monitor services with a pre-configured TCP proxy and persistent volume