Here’s a super quick way to deploy Astro and PocketBase on Railway (referral link).

I used this Dockerfile to deploy PocketBase:

FROM ubuntu:latest

ARG PB_VERSION=0.20.4

# Install unzip and ca-certificates
RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y \
    unzip \
    ca-certificates && \
    rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

# download and unzip PocketBase
ADD https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/releases/download/v${PB_VERSION}/pocketbase_${PB_VERSION}_linux_amd64.zip /tmp/pb.zip
RUN unzip /tmp/pb.zip -d /pb/ && \
    rm /tmp/pb.zip

EXPOSE 8080

# start PocketBase
CMD ["/pb/pocketbase", "serve", "--http=0.0.0.0:8080"]

and this Dockerfile to deploy SSR Astro:

FROM node:lts-slim as runtime
WORKDIR /app

# Ensure that both node_modules and package-lock.json are removed.
COPY package.json .
RUN rm -rf node_modules package-lock.json

# Perform a fresh installation of npm dependencies.
RUN npm install

# Copy the rest of your application files.
COPY . .

# Build your application.
RUN npm run build

# Set environment variables and expose the appropriate port.
ENV HOST=0.0.0.0
ENV PORT=3000
EXPOSE 3000

# Define the command to run your application.
CMD node ./dist/server/entry.mjs

Avoiding Alpine Linux as the base image fixed an issue with internal links I had, so now the 2 instances can talk via *.railway.internal internal Railway URLs.

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	Working with Images from the command line
2:	Working with Containers from the command line
3:	Troubleshooting container exits
4:	How to commit changes to an image
5:	Updating a deployed container
6:	Accessing files outside a container
7:	Dockerfile for Astro on Fly.io
8:	▶︎ Dockerfiles for Astro and Pocketbase on Railway