Understand The Railway Template Services

The Prism Railway template deploys Prism as a set of cooperating services. This page explains what each service is responsible for at a user/operator level.

Use this when you are looking at a Railway project and want to know which service owns which part of Prism.

Template Overview

The template provisions the main Prism services into one Railway project.

Railway template service overview

Each service has a narrow responsibility. Keeping them separate makes it easier to configure, restart, and reason about the system.

Codex Runtime

codex-runtime runs Codex-backed sessions for Prism.

Codex Runtime service in Railway

Prism uses this service when an operator asks the agent to respond, triage, or work through a workflow step. It keeps the Codex execution surface separate from the site UI and request state.

Communication Adapter

The communication adapter connects external chat surfaces to Prism.

Communication adapter service in Railway

For Discord deployments, this service handles bot transport, slash commands, thread or mention routing, and Discord-specific features. The same role can be extended for other communication surfaces.

Task Runner

task-runner handles scheduled and repeatable work.

Task runner service in Railway

Tasks can be agent-backed, such as asking Prism to draft a recurring update, or deterministic, such as running a script on a schedule.

Site And Prism Memory

site is the web app and API front door. Prism Memory owns collected memory, knowledge sources, generated state, and memory APIs.

Site and Prism Memory services in Railway

The admin UI, request board, workflows, skills, hooks, and operator-facing API routes live in site. Memory collection, digests, knowledge indexing, and memory reads live in Prism Memory.

Service Map

  • site: admin UI, request board, workflows, skills, hooks, app API, and instance-owned state.
  • codex-runtime: Codex execution sessions used by chat and workflow steps.
  • communication-adapter: Discord, Telegram, or other chat transport.
  • task-runner: scheduled tasks and recurring automation.
  • prism-memory: rolling memory, knowledge sources, digests, and memory APIs.

For deeper deployment details, see docs/operations/railway-setup.md and docs/operations/template-deploy-runbook.md in this repository.