deploymentHowTo

Deploy MCP on Railway

Deploy an MCP server on Railway from GitHub with env vars, health checks, logs, and client configuration.

Quick Answer / TL;DR

Deploy MCP on Railway by pushing the server to GitHub, creating a Railway project from the repo, setting environment variables, exposing an HTTP endpoint, and testing with a client config.

Key Takeaways

Containerize or use Railway buildpacks.
Set secrets in Railway variables.
Test a health route before client rollout.

Step-by-step deployment

Railway is useful for small teams that want quick GitHub-based deployment, environment variables, logs, and restarts without managing servers directly.

Step	Action
1	Push MCP server to GitHub
2	Create Railway project from repo
3	Set MCP_API_KEY and downstream secrets
4	Expose health and MCP routes
5	Connect Claude, Cursor, or custom client

FROM node:22-slim
WORKDIR /app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm ci --omit=dev
COPY . .
ENV NODE_ENV=production
CMD ["node", "server.js"]

Client endpoint

After deploy, configure the remote URL and token in the client. Rotate keys if the URL was shared during testing.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "india-edge-api": {
      "url": "https://mcpserver.in/v1/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer ${MCP_API_KEY}",
        "X-Data-Region": "in"
      }
    }
  }
}