Deploy and Host CronLite on Railway

CronLite is a lightweight, self-hosted cron service for HTTP webhooks. Create a job with a cron expression and a URL, and CronLite calls it on schedule with HMAC-signed payloads, automatic retries and full execution history. It includes a REST API, an admin UI and a built-in MCP server, so AI agents can create and manage schedules.

About Hosting CronLite

This template deploys two services: CronLite, a small Go binary that typically uses 10–20 MiB of memory, and a Railway PostgreSQL database that stores jobs and execution history. On first boot CronLite creates its own schema, so there are no manual migration steps. After deploying, open /admin/setup on your service's domain, paste the generated ADMIN_BOOTSTRAP_TOKEN from the Variables tab, and create your first API key. Then delete the token variable and redeploy. Jobs can call public URLs or other services in the same project over Railway's private network. You can add replicas later: instances share the database, elect a leader and fail over automatically.

Common Use Cases

Per-minute schedules in any IANA timezone, beyond the 5-minute, UTC-only limits of built-in cron
Triggering internal services over the private network (cleanups, reports, syncs) with retries and signed requests
Letting AI agents create, pause and inspect scheduled jobs over MCP

Dependencies for CronLite Hosting

PostgreSQL (included in this template)
A public domain for the API, admin UI and MCP endpoint (generated by Railway)

Implementation Details

Create a job from any HTTP client using an API key from the admin UI:

curl -X POST https:///jobs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer " \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"nightly-report","cron_expression":"0 2 * * *","timezone":"America/Toronto","webhook_url":"http://reports.railway.internal:8080/run","webhook_secret":"change-me"}'

AI agents connect to the MCP endpoint at https:///mcp with the same Bearer key. Full documentation: https://github.com/djlord-it/cronlite/blob/main/OPERATORS.md#deploying-on-railway

Why Deploy CronLite 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 CronLite 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.