Deploy and Host ClickHouse on Railway

ClickHouse is the open-source column-oriented database for real-time analytics. It runs SQL over billions of rows in milliseconds and backs product analytics, observability stacks, log search and event pipelines.

This template runs ClickHouse 26.8 as a single service from a digest-pinned official image: the HTTP interface on an HTTPS domain, the native protocol on the private network, and all data on a Railway volume.

About Hosting ClickHouse

ClickHouse runs on Railway only after a few things are handled for you:

SQL user management is on. The default user can run CREATE USER, CREATE ROLE and GRANT, so you can give each app its own read-only or scoped account. A stock deploy leaves access management off and every CREATE USER fails with Not enough privileges, which leaves one shared admin password for every client.
System logs cannot fill your volume. ClickHouse writes its own metrics and query history into system tables that never expire by default; on an idle server asynchronous_metric_log alone gains millions of rows an hour. Here every system log table keeps 7 days and then deletes itself, and the server text log is kept at warning level instead of trace, so the disk you pay for holds your data.
Server log files are capped at three 100 MB files.
A password is generated per deploy, and anonymous requests are rejected.
Data survives redeploys. Tables, users and grants live on the attached volume.
Memory is sized to your plan. ClickHouse reads the container's cgroup limit and keeps its memory ceiling at 90% of it.

Common Use Cases

Product and web analytics (a self-hosted backend for event tracking and dashboards)
Log, trace and metrics storage for observability stacks
Real-time dashboards over event streams in Grafana, Metabase or Superset
Fast aggregation for AI and data pipelines over large append-only tables

Dependencies for ClickHouse Hosting

One Railway volume for the data directory (created by the template)

Deployment Dependencies

ClickHouse documentation: https://clickhouse.com/docs
Official image: https://hub.docker.com/r/clickhouse/clickhouse-server

Implementation Details

Variable	Purpose
`CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD`	Password of the `default` user, generated per deploy.
`DATABASE_URL`	HTTP URL with credentials over the private network, for services in the same project.
`PUBLIC_DATABASE_URL`	HTTPS URL with credentials over the public domain.
`CLICKHOUSE_NATIVE_PRIVATE_URL`	`clickhouse://` URL on the native protocol (port 9000), private network.
`CLICKHOUSE_URL`	Public HTTPS address (Play UI at `/play`).
`CLICKHOUSE_PRIVATE_URL`	Private HTTP address.

Reference it from another service with ${{clickhouse.DATABASE_URL}}.

Create a scoped user for an app:

CREATE USER app IDENTIFIED BY 'change-me';
GRANT SELECT ON default.* TO app;

Why Deploy ClickHouse 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 ClickHouse 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.