Design Goals

Design principles that guide our development of Railpack:

1. Zero config for all popular languages and frameworks. One tool for Node, Python, Go, PHP, etc and any popular frameworks within those ecosystems. Building a container for a project should require no railpack-specific customization.
2. Unopinionated runtime defaults. No timezone, locale, or other opinionated configuration is included by default. However, all common configuration paths should be easily supported and obvious universal configuration should be included by default.
3. Make failures obvious. When a project contains custom configuration that will likely cause a build error, make this obvious to the user.
4. Allow overrides. Make it easy for a user to override any default configuration setting.
5. Integration tests for everything. Hundreds of example apps built and run in CI. We prefer larger-scoped integration tests, especially when supporting new frameworks, than tightly scoped unit tests.