How do I deploy ChromaDB on Railway?

You can deploy ChromaDB on Railway by clicking the "Deploy Now" button on this page. Railway will automatically set up all the necessary services and configurations for you.

What are the system requirements?

Railway handles all the infrastructure requirements. You only need a web browser to deploy and manage your application.

Is this template free to use?

Yes, this template is free to use within your existing Railway account.

Can I customize this template?

Yes, you can fully customize this template. After deployment, you will have full control of what you've deployed in your Railway project.

How do I get support for this template?

You can get support through our community forum: chroma-db-234bc830, or click "Get template help" for this template for more assistance.

Deploy and Host ChromaDB with Railway

ChromaDB is the open-source vector database built for AI.

Deploy v1.5.0 in under 2 minutes using the official Docker image (3.9M+ pulls).

One service, one volume, no auth proxy.

Runs on private networking so your data stays internal and traffic between services is free.

About Hosting ChromaDB

ChromaDB is purpose-built for AI applications. Its Rust core delivers up to 4x faster writes and queries, scaling from prototype to billions of embeddings without switching databases. It ships with hybrid search combining vector similarity, full-text, BM25, and SPLADE through Reciprocal Rank Fusion for better retrieval quality out of the box. Multi-modal support means text, image, and audio embeddings live in a single collection. This template deploys the official chromadb/chroma image directly from Docker Hub with no forks, no modifications, and no custom code. Data persists to a Railway Volume at /data and survives restarts and redeploys automatically.

Common Use Cases

RAG pipelines - Store document embeddings and retrieve high-relevance context for LLM prompts
Hybrid search - Combine semantic similarity with keyword matching for better results than either alone
LLM memory - Give AI agents persistent long-term memory across conversations
Multimodal search - Query text, image, and audio embeddings from a single collection
Recommendation engines - Surface similar content at scale using embedding similarity

Dependencies for ChromaDB Hosting

Official Docker image: chromadb/chroma v1.5.0 (3.9M+ pulls)
Railway Volume at /data for persistent storage
Private networking only, never exposed to the public internet
No external databases or additional services required

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Connect from any service in your Railway project:

  import chromadb

  client = chromadb.HttpClient(host="chromadb.railway.internal", port=8000)
  collection = client.get_or_create_collection("my_embeddings")

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