Deploy and Host A Citus Postgres 17 Cluster on Railway

A Citus cluster is a horizontally scalable PostgreSQL deployment powered by the Citus extension. It distributes tables across many worker nodes, enabling high performance for large datasets, parallel query execution, and multi-node transactional workloads — all while keeping the familiar PostgreSQL interface.

About Hosting A Citus Postgres 17 Cluster

Hosting a Citus Postgres 17 Cluster involves deploying a coordinator node and a set of worker nodes, all running Postgres 17 with the Citus extension enabled. The coordinator routes queries and keeps metadata, while workers store shard data and execute operations in parallel. Deploying this on Railway automates the creation, networking, and lifecycle management of each node. With Railway’s environment variables, service linking, and orchestration tools, you can set up a distributed Postgres system with minimal configuration and scale nodes up or down as needed.

Common Use Cases

• High-throughput applications requiring horizontal scaling of PostgreSQL
• Real-time analytics or event ingestion workloads
• Multi-tenant SaaS platforms needing isolation across tenants

Dependencies for Citus Cluster Hosting

• PostgreSQL 17 with the Citus extension installed
• Coordinator and worker nodes reachable over private networking

Deployment Dependencies

• Official Citus documentation: https://docs.citusdata.com
• PostgreSQL documentation: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/index.html
• Railway deployment reference: https://docs.railway.app

Implementation Details

This template comes with a registrar, coordinator, and 2 workers (worker1, worker2). Upon deployment, the registrar will search for workers (worker1, worker2, ... workerN) and add them to the cluster. Afterwards, connect to the coordinator to create and distribute your first table!

-- Example distributed table
CREATE TABLE events (
    id BIGSERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    tenant_id INT NOT NULL,
    payload JSONB NOT NULL,
    created_at TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT now()
);

-- Distribute on tenant_id
SELECT create_distributed_table('events', 'tenant_id');

Why Deploy a Citus cluster 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 a Citus cluster 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.