Deploy and Host BrowserBird on Railway

BrowserBird is a self-hosted AI agent orchestrator for Slack with a real Chromium browser, a cron scheduler, and a web dashboard. Talk to an AI agent in Slack threads. It can browse the web using Playwright MCP with a real Chromium browser you can watch live through a built-in VNC viewer, run scheduled tasks, and keep persistent sessions across conversations. The agent CLI handles reasoning and tools; BrowserBird is the orchestration layer.

About Hosting BrowserBird

BrowserBird runs as two services: an app service (Node.js API, Slack connection, web dashboard) and a VM service (Chromium browser, Wayland compositor, VNC). The app service is the one you interact with; open its URL to access the web dashboard. The VM service has no web UI of its own. The app service needs a persistent volume at /app/.browserbird for its SQLite database, config, and session history. This volume must survive redeployments, so verify it is attached before your first deploy. On first launch, a web-based onboarding wizard walks you through Slack app setup, agent configuration, and API keys. No manual config files needed.

The VM service runs a headless desktop environment with Chromium, accessible through the web dashboard's built-in VNC viewer. Allocate at least 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM for the VM service to keep Chromium stable.

Region selection: Deploy both services in the region closest to your location. Railway may auto-select a distant region, which causes high VNC latency and makes interactive browser tasks (CAPTCHAs, form filling) difficult or impossible. Both services must be in the same region.

Automatic updates: Enable automatic deployments in Railway service settings so new BrowserBird versions apply without manual intervention.

Common Use Cases

• Chat with an AI agent in Slack that can browse the web, fill forms, and take screenshots using a real browser
• Schedule recurring AI tasks (called "birds") on a cron to monitor pages, generate reports, or collect data
• Run a shared AI assistant for your team with persistent conversation history and a live browser you can watch
• Stop any running session or bird mid-flight from Slack using an in-thread "stop" message or the /bird stop command

Dependencies for BrowserBird Hosting

• A Slack workspace with a configured Slack app (bot token and app-level token)
• An Anthropic API key (required for shared/commercial use) or Claude OAuth token (for personal self-hosted use)

Deployment Dependencies

• Slack app setup guide - Create a Slack app using the provided manifest
• Anthropic API - Get an API key for the agent CLI
• BrowserBird documentation - Full configuration reference

Why Deploy BrowserBird 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 BrowserBird 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.