🔥 I Lost 24 Hours of Work Deploying n8n on Railway — Don’t Make My Mistake

This week, I learned a tough (and humbling) lesson.

I spent over 24 hours building an AI agent POC with help from the brilliant

— everything was running smooth on an n8n instance I deployed to Railway... until it wasn’t.

Instead of using localhost, I opted to deploy n8n directly to Railway (easy, right?). After getting 95% of the way there, I hit a snag: webhook URLs were defaulting to localhost:5678, making external access a no-go.

✅ Solution: I added the following environment variables:

N8N_LISTEN_ADDRESS ::

WEBHOOK_URL = https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}

N8N_EDITOR_BASE_URL = https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}

👉 If you're enabling MCP, don’t forget these too:

N8N_COMMUNITY_PACKAGES_ALLOW_TOOL_USAGE = true

N8N_ENFORCE_SETTINGS_FILE_PERMISSIONS = true

N8N_RUNNERS_ENABLED = true

But here’s where it went south…

After updating the variables, I deployed the changes — and boom, I got redirected to the n8n setup page. Everything I built was gone. The deployment had wiped my config. And yeah… I hadn’t backed anything up. The posstive out of this is that. I was able to recreate what I had lost which re-enforced what I've learned during my session with

@Chase Aldridge

and got n8n url working as intended 😎

📌 Lesson of the week:

As a seasoned IT pro, I ignored my own golden rule:

1 - Always back up your data. Then back up your backups. And test those backups. 😓
2 - Document your work, including screenshots
3 - Understand the platform you are working on - RFTM
4 - If possible, spin up a new environment for testing before deploying to working instance.

Hope this saves someone else a headache. 💥

6 comments