# 🚆 What the Railway Dashboard Is

The Railway dashboard is the main web interface for managing your Railway cloud projects. It’s essentially your control panel where you can see, organize, configure, and monitor everything you’re hosting on Railway — services, deployments, databases, environments, logs, metrics, and more.

You typically land on the dashboard after signing into your Railway account. It’s the central hub that gives you a high-level view of all your projects and infrastructure.

## 🧠 What It Lets You Do

### 📦 1. See and Manage Projects

The dashboard shows all projects you own or belong to, sorted by recent activity.

Each project can contain multiple services (like a web app, API, worker, database).

From the dashboard you can click into each project to manage details.

### ⚙️ 2. Configure and Deploy Services

Within a project, you can link code repositories (GitHub) or container images.

Railway handles build and deploy processes automatically — including automatic configuration for many languages/frameworks.

Deployments are shown with statuses (building, deployed, errors).

### 📊 3. Monitoring & Observability

View logs and performance metrics (CPU, memory, network, disk usage) per service.

You can create dashboards with charts and custom widgets for things like request rates or error logs.

Set alerts for thresholds (like high CPU or errors) and receive notifications via Slack, Discord, email, and more.

### 🔐 4. Manage Secrets & Environment Variables

Set configuration variables (like API keys or database URLs) that your services use.

Variables can be scoped to services or shared across the entire project.

### 🔁 5. Staging & Environments

Railway supports multiple environments (dev, staging, prod).

You can preview changes in separate environments and promote or rollback deployments with a click.

### 📚 6. Templates & One-Click Deploy

Access a library of templates to quickly deploy common stacks (e.g., databases with backend, analytics tools).

Templates auto-provision services and databases as a project.

## 🧑‍💻 How It Works (Behind the Scenes)

Railway’s dashboard directly reflects the state of your projects by talking to its API backend (the same API used by their CLI). It pulls data like:

Project list and status

Deployment logs and history

Resources (CPU, memory, traffic)

Environment and configuration values

Changes you make in the dashboard (like redeploying or updating variables) are sent back to the Railway API and applied to your infrastructure.