Deploy and Host CISO Assistant on Railway

CISO Assistant is an open-source GRC platform by Intuitem that unifies Risk Management, AppSec, Compliance & Audit, Third-Party Risk, Business Impact Analysis, Privacy, and Reporting. It ships with 150+ global frameworks and automatic control mapping, including ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2, CIS, PCI DSS, NIS2, DORA, GDPR, HIPAA, and CMMC.

About Hosting CISO Assistant

CISO Assistant is a multi-service application. It runs a Django REST API backend, a Huey background worker for asynchronous jobs (emails, scheduled tasks, computations), a SvelteKit frontend served by a Node adapter, a PostgreSQL database, and a Qdrant vector database that powers the AI/semantic-search features. A Caddy reverse proxy fronts the stack and terminates traffic. Hosting involves wiring these services together over a private network, providing a persistent volume for uploaded attachments and the Huey queue, keeping the Django secret key stable across redeploys, and setting a handful of URL/origin environment variables so the frontend, backend, and browser all agree on the public address.

Common Use Cases

Running an ISO 27001, SOC 2, or NIST CSF compliance program with automatic control mapping and shared evidence across 150+ frameworks.
Conducting enterprise risk assessments and tracking remediation and action plans through to closure.
Managing third-party/vendor risk, business impact analysis, and audit campaigns from a single GRC workspace.

Dependencies for CISO Assistant Hosting

PostgreSQL database - stores all application data (set POSTGRES_NAME, POSTGRES_USER, POSTGRES_PASSWORD, DB_HOST, DB_PORT).
Qdrant vector database - stores embeddings for the AI, chat, and semantic-search features (QDRANT_URL).
A persistent volume - required for uploaded attachments and the Huey SQLite queue so they survive redeploys.

Deployment Dependencies

CISO Assistant repository: https://github.com/intuitem/ciso-assistant-community
Documentation: https://intuitem.gitbook.io/ciso-assistant
Reference docker-compose: https://github.com/intuitem/ciso-assistant-community/blob/main/docker-compose.yml
Qdrant: https://qdrant.tech
Caddy (reverse proxy): https://caddyserver.com

Implementation Details

Two things differ from a plain docker-compose deployment:

Backend and Huey are combined into one service. Huey shares a SQLite queue file with the backend, so both run in a single service with a shared volume rather than as separate containers.
Trusted origins come from the frontend's public URL. Set the frontend's ORIGIN (and the backend's CISO_ASSISTANT_URL) to your public domain, or SvelteKit blocks login with Cross-site POST form submissions are forbidden.

Why Deploy CISO Assistant 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 CISO Assistant 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.