railway shell

Open a new shell session with environment variables from your Railway service available.

Usage

railway shell [OPTIONS]

Options

Examples

Open shell with variables

railway shell

Output:

Entering subshell with Railway variables available. Type 'exit' to exit.

Shell for specific service

railway shell --service backend

Silent mode

railway shell --silent

How it works

1. Fetches environment variables from the specified Railway service
2. Opens a new shell with those variables in the environment
3. Sets IN_RAILWAY_SHELL=true to indicate you're in a Railway shell

Type exit to leave the shell and return to your normal environment.

Shell detection

On Windows, the CLI detects your current shell (PowerShell, cmd, pwsh) and opens the same type. On Unix systems, it uses the $SHELL environment variable.

Difference from

• shell: Opens an interactive shell session
• run: Executes a single command and exits

Related

• railway run
• railway dev