Getting started

Sign in

Railyard is passwordless. Enter your email and we send you a one-time 6-digit sign-in code; where your organisation has configured it, you can use single sign-on with Google, GitHub or an enterprise provider instead. There is nothing to remember and no password to leak. The permanent Community plan is free, does not require a payment card, and includes unlimited estates and devices, with up to 25 racks in each estate. See Plans & billing for what the paid plans add.

Signing in for the first time creates your account. Before you start, Railyard asks you to tick a box to agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge the Privacy Policy, and keeps a record of the versions you accepted. If the Terms later change materially, you are asked to accept the new version the next time you open Railyard. Until you do, Railyard shows that step instead of your projects and nothing can be changed; from it you can download your account data or sign out, and your projects stay readable through the API.

Your example estate

Once you have agreed to the Terms on your first sign-in, Railyard seeds a cabled example and drops you straight into it. Hosted Community gets a compact five-rack estate; paid and billing-disabled deployments can use the full eight-rack example. Both include a spine-leaf fabric and a wall-mounted building patch field. It is real project data you can edit, break and rebuild, so you are never staring at an empty canvas wondering what to do next. Start fresh whenever you like with + New project.

Choose Example data centre when creating a project to get the refreshed estate with named cable ports, complete patch-panel paths, installed network modules, custom ports and optics, plus exact PSU-to-PDU outlet connections and redundant custom power inlets. The reference design opens with no review errors or warnings, while still leaving spare ports and outlets to explore. Its pod racks each have one leaf, so Design review notes each leaf as its rack's single network failure domain. Installed configurations are illustrative; upstream electrical independence remains unverified even where PDUs are labelled A/B.

Already have an example? Saved projects are never overwritten or upgraded automatically. Signed-in example projects have Project settings → Example project → Create refreshed example…: preview the latest features and create a separately named copy, keeping your original project and its links. In local mode, use Settings → Example project → Open example project…. Download the current JSON and confirm you have saved it before replacing the single browser-saved document. Local replacement clears Undo and cannot be undone; to restore the original, open the downloaded backup with Settings → Open project file.

Take the tour

A five-step walkthrough opens over the example on first load. It explains flexible spaces, the rack workbench and the path from equipment to design review. Reopen it from Help in the tool rail; press ? for the shortcut sheet. Help → Guides also offers short Power, Cabling, Topology and Version control walkthroughs, with a tick for each completed guide. Feature workspaces offer their guide once on your first visit. Version control guides appear only in projects where version control is enabled.

Create a project

Click + New project, name it, and choose a starting point: a blank estate comes seeded with sensible rack types and a naming scheme so it is usable immediately, or clone the sample to get the demo estate on demand. The name becomes the project's URL slug — see the estate model for how naming and deep links work.

To bring in an existing design, choose Project file as the starting point and pick (or drop) a Railyard project JSON file: a .railyard.json download, a canonical JSON export, or a document written by the CLI or your own tooling. Railyard checks the file, upgrades older documents and shows what it holds before you create it. The import becomes a separate project with its own URL, so the project it came from is never changed, and your plan's limits apply as for any other project. The command palette's Open project file… opens the same choice. In local mode, use Settings → Open project file, which replaces the browser-saved project after you download a backup of the current one and confirm.

An empty estate offers Colocation, Enterprise, Branch office and Data centre templates. Choose one to create a starting structure and rack, or use Add space and Add rack to build your own. Every level is optional.

Find your way around

• The estate tree on the left holds your spaces and racks, including custom spaces such as cages and suites. Click an item to open it on the board.
• The board in the middle shows the selected container's contents and racks, or a rack elevation once you are inside a rack.
• The inspector on the right edits whatever is selected — a container, rack, device or cable.
• The tool rail on the left holds Commands, the Physical, Power, Cabling, Topology and Store room workspace switch, the estate Tree, Measure, Review, Version control when it is enabled, Activity in a hosted project, Share, Settings, Docs, Help (guides and the shortcut sheet) and Export. Settings opens Project settings (the Settings page in the local editor) with the rail still beside it, so a workspace is one click away. The device and rack library lives in Project settings, or choose Open Library from the command palette. Press ? for the full keyboard reference, or ⌘K for the command palette.