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Railpack Docs

Installing Additional Packages

Railpack supports installing additional versioned packages from Mise, or packages from Apt.

Mise

Section titled “Mise”

You can set the RAILPACK_PACKAGES environment variable to install additional packages from Mise.

For example, this installs the latest versions of Node and Bun, and Python 3.10.

Terminal window
RAILPACK_PACKAGES="node bun@latest [email protected]"

You can find a list of available packages in the Mise registry.

Apt

Section titled “Apt”

Apt packages are split into those needed for the build and those needed at runtime.

You can set the RAILPACK_BUILD_APT_PACKAGES and RAILPACK_DEPLOY_APT_PACKAGES environment variables to customize the Apt packages installed during the build and deployment steps respectively.

In this example, we install build-essential during the build step and ffmpeg at runtime while retaining packages Railpack adds automatically.

Terminal window
RAILPACK_BUILD_APT_PACKAGES="... build-essential"
RAILPACK_DEPLOY_APT_PACKAGES="... ffmpeg"

The ... entry extends Railpack’s generated package list. Without it, the configured list replaces the packages Railpack specifies:

{
  "$schema": "https://schema.railpack.com",
  "buildAptPackages": ["...", "build-essential"],
  "deploy": {
    "aptPackages": ["...", "ffmpeg"]
  }
}

To intentionally replace Railpack’s runtime packages, omit ...:

{
  "$schema": "https://schema.railpack.com",
  "deploy": {
    "aptPackages": ["ffmpeg"]
  }
}