Deploy and Host Activepieces on Railway

Self-host Activepieces with Railway Postgres and Redis. Official ghcr.io/activepieces/activepieces image, one container in WORKER_AND_APP mode. This is the Apache-2.0 Zapier alternative on c17.io/stacks/activepieces. n8n is a separate template: 9o4t/n8n.

No LLM or SaaS API keys are required to boot. The template generates AP_ENCRYPTION_KEY and AP_JWT_SECRET, and wires AP_FRONTEND_URL to the public domain.

About Hosting Activepieces

Activepieces is open-source workflow automation (pieces instead of Zapier apps). Connections are encrypted with AP_ENCRYPTION_KEY. The job queue is Redis. Structured data is Postgres.

On Railway this is three services:

Service	Source	Public	Notes
`activepieces`	`ghcr.io/activepieces/activepieces`	Yes	`AP_PORT=${{PORT}}`. Health `GET /api/v1/health`.
`Postgres`	Railway plugin	No	Flows, runs, connections.
`Redis`	Railway plugin	No	BullMQ queue. Required for this image; in-memory Redis is not used.

The first account you create becomes the platform admin. There is no default username or password.

Losing AP_ENCRYPTION_KEY makes stored connections unreadable, even from a full database backup.

Common Use Cases

Apache-2.0 replacement for Zapier / Make
Webhook and polling pieces without a task meter
MCP / agent tools on top of the same flows
Customer-data automations you will not put on a SaaS graph

Dependencies for Activepieces Hosting

Required (wired or generated — you do not type these)

Variable	Service	Source
`PORT`	activepieces	Injected. Also set `AP_PORT=${{PORT}}`.
`AP_FRONTEND_URL`	activepieces	`https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}`
`AP_ENCRYPTION_KEY`	activepieces	Generated `openssl rand -hex 16` (32 hex chars). Back this up.
`AP_JWT_SECRET`	activepieces	Generated `openssl rand -hex 32`.
`AP_ENVIRONMENT`	activepieces	`prod`
`AP_EXECUTION_MODE`	activepieces	`UNSANDBOXED` (single-container Railway)
`AP_CONTAINER_TYPE`	activepieces	`WORKER_AND_APP`
`AP_DB_TYPE`	activepieces	`POSTGRES`
`AP_POSTGRES_URL`	activepieces	`${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}` (discrete host fields ignored when this is set)
`AP_REDIS_URL`	activepieces	`${{Redis.REDIS_URL}}`

Optional

Variable	Required	Why
`AP_TELEMETRY_ENABLED`	No	Default `false` in this template.
`AP_OPENAI_API_KEY`	No	Only if you enable semantic piece search (`AP_TOOL_SEARCH_ENABLED=true`). BYO.
Slack / Google / other piece keys	No	Added inside Activepieces connections after deploy. Not template variables.

Volume

Mount	Service	Why
`/usr/src/app/cache`	activepieces	Piece cache. Optional but avoids re-downloads on every deploy.

Why Deploy Activepieces on Railway?

Make and Zapier meter runs. Activepieces is Apache-2.0: you pay Railway (app + Postgres + Redis) and the APIs you call. A small team graph is usually a few dollars a month plus tokens. Trial credits cover the first deploy for most people. c17 never charges you — Railway usage is the referral / template kickback.

See TEMPLATE.md for the marketplace / composer shape.

Run locally

cp .env.example .env
# set AP_ENCRYPTION_KEY (openssl rand -hex 16)
# set AP_JWT_SECRET and AP_POSTGRES_PASSWORD (openssl rand -hex 32)
docker compose up

UI: http://localhost:8080 — create the first admin account. Health: GET /api/v1/health.

License

Activepieces is Apache-2.0. This repo is config and docs only.