Connect Railway to Excel, Sheets and AI

DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL, not DATABASE_URL

This is the single most common way a Railway connection fails, and it fails in the least helpful way possible.

• Railway's private hostname ends in .railway.internal and resolves only inside Railway's own network. From anywhere else it does not resolve at all.
• The agent runs outside Railway, so the private address is never reachable — the connection would simply hang rather than tell you why.
• So the card rejects it outright and names the fix: use the public TCP-proxy host from DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL. That turns a silent timeout into a sentence you can act on.
• The public proxy host ends in .proxy.rlwy.net. Older Railway deploys were issued .railway.app hostnames instead, and those still work if that is what your service has.

The port is per service, so nothing can guess it

Most managed Postgres services answer on 5432. Railway's proxy does not, and the card deliberately leaves the field empty.

• Railway assigns a proxy port per service. Two databases in the same project will have different ones, and neither will be 5432.
• The port field has no default for exactly that reason. An assumed 5432 would look filled in and then fail to connect, which is worse than an empty box.
• Pasting DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL fills the port along with everything else, so the normal path never asks you to find it separately.
• If you are typing the fields by hand, the port is the one to copy carefully — it is the field most likely to be wrong and the one that produces the least informative failure.

Self-signed certificates, and what encrypted means here

Railway's Postgres image ships a self-signed certificate, which decides how the agent handles TLS.

• Use SSL is on by default and the connection is encrypted. The agent requires TLS rather than merely offering it.
• The certificate chain is not verified. Full verification would reject Railway's self-signed certificate, so requiring encryption without validating the chain is the setting that actually matches the service.
• Read that as protection against anyone reading the traffic on the way, rather than proof of what you reached.
• There is no pooler in front of Railway Postgres and the card does not pretend otherwise — this is a direct connection over the proxy, with no pooled mode to choose.

-- Ordinary Postgres, read-only, over the public proxy
SELECT   c.name,
         COUNT(o.id)   AS orders,
         SUM(o.amount) AS revenue
FROM     public.customers AS c
JOIN     public.orders    AS o ON o.customer_id = c.id
WHERE    o.placed_at >= now() - interval '30 days'
GROUP BY c.name
ORDER BY revenue DESC;