Deploy Anubis

Deploy and Host Anubis on Railway

Anubis is a web application firewall that protects sites from aggressive AI crawlers and scrapers. It sits in front of your app as a reverse proxy, gives browsers a small proof-of-work challenge, blocks known bad bots by rule, and lets real visitors and well-behaved tools through, reducing load caused by scraping.

About Hosting Anubis

This template deploys Anubis v1.27.0 from the official image in front of a small whoami placeholder app, so it works right after deploying. Replace the placeholder by pointing TARGET at your own service's private address, then delete the app service. The signing key is generated once, so visitors keep their pass across redeploys. Anubis also serves a robots.txt that disallows known AI crawlers. Railway's edge supplies the client IP header Anubis needs. It is very light and fits the Hobby plan. Tune the challenge difficulty and bot rules with environment variables or a policy file.

Common Use Cases

• Protecting docs sites, wikis, forges and blogs from AI scrapers
• Reducing bandwidth and CPU spent on crawler traffic
• Putting a challenge in front of any HTTP service on Railway

Dependencies for Anubis Hosting

• ghcr.io/techarohq/anubis:v1.27.0 (official image)
• traefik/whoami:v1.11.0 as a placeholder upstream

Deployment Dependencies

• Anubis documentation
• Anubis v1.27.0 release
• Bot policies
• Railway private networking

Implementation Details

Protect your own service:

TARGET=http://${{your-service.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:${{your-service.PORT}}

Notes:

• Anubis has no HTTP health check, because Railway's health check carries no client IP header; the restart policy covers crashes.
• Move your custom domain to the anubis service so all traffic passes through it.

This is a community-maintained deployment package and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by the Anubis project or its maintainers.

Why Deploy Anubis on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Anubis on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.