Deploy and Host Dragonfly on Railway

Dragonfly is a multi-threaded, Redis-compatible in-memory datastore. It speaks the Redis protocol, so existing clients, queues, rate limiters and caches connect to it unchanged, and it keeps a whole dataset in memory across every core of the container.

This template runs Dragonfly 2.0 as a single service from a digest-pinned official image: the Redis port on a Railway TCP proxy, and a Railway volume holding snapshots that are rewritten every five minutes.

About Hosting Dragonfly

A crash does not erase your data. A stock Dragonfly container saves only on a clean shutdown; after a hard kill (an out-of-memory kill, a node failure) it restarts empty. This template saves a snapshot to the volume every five minutes under a fixed file name, so a hard kill loses at most the last five minutes and the snapshots never pile up on the volume.
A password is required from the first connection. It is generated per deploy; anonymous clients are rejected.
Memory and threads follow your plan. The start command reads the container's memory limit and passes maxmemory (70% of it, leaving headroom for snapshots) and the thread count.
Two ways in. Services in the same project use the private URL; clients elsewhere use the TCP proxy URL.

Common Use Cases

A faster drop-in replacement for Redis as a cache or session store
Job queues (BullMQ, Sidekiq, Celery) and rate limiters on the Redis protocol
Leaderboards, counters and real-time state shared between services
Large in-memory datasets that need to use every core

Dependencies for Dragonfly Hosting

One Railway volume for snapshots (created by the template)

Deployment Dependencies

Dragonfly documentation: https://www.dragonflydb.io/docs
Official image: https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly/pkgs/container/dragonfly

Implementation Details

Variable	Purpose
`DRAGONFLY_PASSWORD`	Password for connections, generated per deploy.
`DRAGONFLY_PRIVATE_URL`	`redis://` URL on the private network, for services in the same project.
`DRAGONFLY_PUBLIC_URL`	`redis://` URL on the TCP proxy, for clients outside Railway.

Python:

import redis
r = redis.from_url("")
r.set("hello", "world")

Why Deploy Dragonfly 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 Dragonfly 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.