Deploy and Host Browserless on Railway

Headless Chrome as a service - Browserless v2, pinned, behind a generated token.

About Hosting Browserless

The Browserless template on Railway is literally called "Browserless v1", and that is the problem. Upstream moved to v2 in 2023; v1 stopped at 1.61.1 and receives nothing - no Chrome updates, no security fixes. It also builds from a repository rather than the published image, which is why about one deployment in six fails.

This one runs the official v2 image at a pinned version, with a generated token and sane concurrency limits.

Common Use Cases

Rendering pages to PDF or screenshots from your own backend
Running Puppeteer or Playwright without shipping Chrome inside your app image
Scraping and automated checks, with a queue in front so a burst does not exhaust memory

Dependencies for Browserless Hosting

Nothing. One service, no database.

Deployment Dependencies

Documentation: https://docs.browserless.io
Source: https://github.com/browserless/browserless

Implementation Details

Everything is behind TOKEN. Requests without it are refused with 401 - which matters more here than for most services: an open Browserless instance is a free browser that anyone on the internet can point at any URL, billed to you.

Variable	Why
TOKEN	Generated. Required on every request as ?token= or a header
CONCURRENT	Sessions running at once - each is a Chrome instance, so this is your memory ceiling
QUEUED	Requests waiting for a slot before the service starts rejecting
TIMEOUT	Milliseconds before a session is killed; stops a hung page holding a slot forever
CORS	Allows browser-side calls

Quick check once it is up:

curl "https://your-domain/json/version?token=YOUR_TOKEN"
curl -X POST "https://your-domain/pdf?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" -d '{"url":"https://example.com"}' -o page.pdf

Connect Puppeteer with puppeteer.connect({ browserWSEndpoint: "wss://your-domain?token=YOUR_TOKEN" }).

Sizing note: each concurrent session is a Chrome process. CONCURRENT=5 on a small instance is a reasonable start; raise it and watch memory before assuming it scales.

Why Deploy Browserless on Railway?

Chrome and its dependencies stay out of your application image, the service scales separately from your app, and TLS on the domain means wss:// works without extra configuration.