Deploy and Host CakeCRM on Railway

CakeCRM is a free, open-source CRM with an AI sales assistant built in. Contacts, companies, a drag-and-drop pipeline, todos and reports, each on one screen, for a small team that wants a CRM it actually opens. It is fully usable with no AI key; add one in the app and the assistant appears.

About Hosting CakeCRM

CakeCRM is one web service (FastAPI serving a built React app) and a PostgreSQL database. This template deploys both and wires them together: Postgres injects DATABASE_URL, Railway generates JWT_SECRET, and a persistent volume at /app/backend/data keeps the signing secret and the encryption key for stored credentials across redeploys, so nobody is signed out when you ship an update. The only value you provide is AUTH_PASSWORD. On first start the app creates one admin account (admin@cakecrm.local, or ADMIN_EMAIL if you set it) and offers to load a small fictional dataset so you can see the pipeline with something in it. Health is checked at /api/health.

Common Use Cases

A small sales team that wants contacts, deals and follow-ups in one place without paying per seat or handing its pipeline to a SaaS vendor.
A solo founder or shop owner who works deals from a phone: capture a todo or log a call through Telegram, and let the assistant draft the follow-up into Gmail Drafts.
A foundation for simple business workflow software: fork it, rename the nouns, keep the auth, the multi-user model, the assistant engine and the deploy story.

Dependencies for CakeCRM Hosting

PostgreSQL (provisioned by this template)
A persistent volume mounted at /app/backend/data (configured by this template
Optional: an AI provider key (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Together AI, or Ollama), entered in the app under Settings → AI Setup, never as an environment variable
Optional: a Telegram bot token and a Google OAuth app for Gmail, both configured in the app

Implementation Details

Sign in with the admin email and AUTH_PASSWORD; both are printed to the logs on the first boot. Locked out later? Set AUTH_PASSWORD_RESET to a new password, redeploy, sign in, then remove it and redeploy again.

Gmail is read and draft only. There is no send capability anywhere in the codebase, by design.

Source, issues and the full README: https://github.com/wwilson1017/CakeCRM · Website: https://mycakecrm.com · License: AGPL-3.0

Why Deploy CakeCRM 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 CakeCRM 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.