chore: railway blog (#3031)

Author: NicholasKissel

site/src/posts/2025-10-01-railway-selfhost/image.png

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+export const author = "nicholas-kissel"
+export const published = "2025-10-01"
+export const category = "changelog"
+export const keywords = ["railway", "self-host", "marketplace", "open-source", "deployment", "stateful", "durable objects alternative", "actors"]
+
+# Self-Host Rivet on Railway
+
+Rivet is now a verified app on the Railway Marketplace. With a few clicks, you can deploy and self-host Rivet on Railway and start building stateful apps anywhere you can run Node.js or Bun—without vendor lock-in.
+
+## What’s New with Railway
+
+- **One-click deploy**: Spin up Rivet on Railway in seconds.  
+- **Two templates**: [Rivet Starter](https://railway.com/deploy/rivet-starter) with example app; [Rivet](https://railway.com/deploy/rivet) blank template to start fresh.  
+- **Full Rivet Engine**: Actors, state, routing, and persistence.  
+- **Inspector included**: Real-time actor visibility out of the box.
+
+
+## Why Rivet?
+
+**Open-source alternative to Durable Objects**  
+Durable-Objects-style per-key isolation with portability: run it yourself, keep control of runtime, data, and costs.
+
+**Actors**  
+Each Actor owns a key (e.g., a user, room, cart) with single-threaded execution, in-memory state, and persistence. That means no ad-hoc locks, no “who owns this?” routing, and no bolt-on caches.
+
+**Built-in visibility**  
+Rivet Inspector gives live views of Actor state, messages, and performance for fast debugging.
+
+
+## How to build with Actors
+
+**AI Agents**  
+- Per-agent memory lives in the Actor (no external cache glue).  
+- Tool calls/workflows run sequentially in one place—no race conditions.  
+- Simple long-running steps via Actor messages and scheduled work.
+
+**Real-Time & Collaboration**  
+- Make each room/document a single Actor: ordered events, membership, and presence in one spot.  
+- Broadcast to clients from the room Actor (predictable fan-out, no custom pub/sub scaffolding).  
+
+**Stateful APIs**  
+- One Actor per entity (user/cart/session).  
+- Built-in idempotency per key (retries don’t double-apply).  
+- Consistent read-modify-write without database locks.
+
+**Distributed Workflows**  
+- Decompose by key; Actors communicate via messages instead of shared locks.  
+- Timers/scheduled work per Actor for sagas and retries.  
+- Horizontal scale by sharding keys—no global coordination layer.
+
+## Get Started
+
+Choose the [Rivet Starter](https://railway.com/deploy/rivet-starter) template to explore with an example chat app, or the [Rivet](https://railway.com/deploy/rivet) template to build your own.
+
+For detailed deployment instructions, see the [Railway deployment documentation](https://www.rivet.dev/docs/self-hosting/railway).
+
+## Support
+
+- [GitHub Issues](https://github.com/rivet-gg/rivet/issues)  
+- [Discord](https://rivet.gg/discord)