API & MCP

REST API

Railyard's backend is a REST API, and everything the app does — listing projects, loading and saving a document, validating a design, exporting a bundle, managing organisations — is available over it. Authenticate with a personal access token minted from your user settings. The full endpoint reference lives at /api-docs.

The Railyard MCP server

The Railyard MCP server gives an MCP client — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or any other — read and write access to your Railyard projects and organisations. It talks to a running Railyard backend over the same REST API and authenticates with a personal access token, speaking MCP over stdio.

It exposes tools to, among other things:

• list, read, create, rename, move and delete projects;
• validate a design and export it to any supported format;
• manage organisations, members, invitations and the shared device-type library;
• read billing status and mint a Stripe management link.

Destructive tools (delete, wholesale replace) are clearly marked. The server lives in its own repository, railyard-sh/railyard-mcp, with install instructions for each client — or use the one-line install on the home page. Point your MCP client at it and give it a token.

The canonical document

Both the API and MCP server speak the same canonical Railyard JSON you get from export — one document describing the whole estate — so what you automate and what you design are the same shape.