Deploy and Host Dagu on Railway

Dagu is a local-first workflow orchestrator. Workflows are YAML DAGs, and one binary runs the web UI, API, scheduler, and executors. Runtime state is stored in files, so no database or message broker is required. This is the official template maintained by the Dagu project.

About Hosting Dagu

This template runs the official ghcr.io/dagucloud/dagu image, which starts the web UI, API, and scheduler in one service. A Railway volume mounted at /var/lib/dagu keeps DAG definitions, run history, and logs across redeploys. Built-in authentication is enabled, and the first admin account is created from a generated password stored in the service variables. Keep the service at one replica, because the volume and the scheduler belong to a single instance. Railway mounts volumes as root, so the template runs Dagu as root to write to it.

Common Use Cases

Scheduled data pipelines and ETL jobs defined as YAML DAGs
Operational automation such as backups, reports, cleanup scripts, and health checks
Multi-step jobs with dependencies, retries, approvals, and notifications

Dependencies for Dagu Hosting

The official Docker image ghcr.io/dagucloud/dagu:latest
A Railway volume mounted at /var/lib/dagu

Implementation Details

After the deploy finishes, open the generated domain and sign in as admin. The password is the value of DAGU_AUTH_BUILTIN_INITIAL_ADMIN_PASSWORD in the service variables. It is used only when no users exist, so change the password in the Dagu UI afterwards. For production, pin a versioned image tag instead of latest.

Documentation: https://docs.dagu.sh
Railway guide: https://docs.dagu.sh/server-admin/deployment/cloud/railway
Source code: https://github.com/dagucloud/dagu

Why Deploy Dagu 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 Dagu 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.