Deploy and Host EspoCRM on Railway

EspoCRM is an open-source CRM: accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities, a sales pipeline, activities and calendar, email integration, workflows, reports and a REST API. This template deploys EspoCRM 10.0.6 with a PostgreSQL database, installs it on the first boot, and hands you an administrator account whose password is generated for your deployment alone.

About Hosting EspoCRM

EspoCRM is a PHP application served by Apache, with its data in PostgreSQL and its uploads, cache and customisations on disk. Two things decide whether a self-hosted deployment actually works.

The first is the disk layout. EspoCRM's official image treats a volume mounted on the document root as a "legacy" installation and skips its installer entirely, so a deployment that mounts the whole application directory serves an empty folder and a 403 Forbidden — a CRM that never existed. This template mounts the volume on the data directory instead, and symlinks the two customisation directories onto it, so the installer runs and your schema and layout changes survive a redeploy.

The second is the administrator account. The official image seeds the admin user only during that one-time installation, from environment variables that fall back to the documented default password when they are left empty. This template refuses to boot without an administrator password, refuses to boot with the upstream default, and re-applies your password on every boot — so a redeploy is a working password reset, which matters because a fresh instance has no mail server to send a reset link with.

Apache is also pointed at the port Railway assigns, and the scheduled-job daemon runs alongside it so workflows, reminders and email fetching actually fire.

Why Deploy EspoCRM on Railway?

Railway gives EspoCRM the two things it needs — a managed PostgreSQL service on the private network and a persistent volume — behind a single deploy. The application and its database come up together with the credentials already wired, an HTTPS domain is issued automatically, and scaling memory or CPU is a slider rather than a server migration.

Common Use Cases

A sales team tracking leads, opportunities and a pipeline without per-seat SaaS fees.
A support or account-management team that needs contact history and email in one place.
A back office automating follow-ups, reminders and reports through EspoCRM's workflow engine.

Dependencies for EspoCRM

PostgreSQL 17 (included in this template).
A persistent volume for uploads, cache and customisations.

Deployment Dependencies

After Deploying

Open the public URL.
Sign in as admin with the generated ESPOCRM_ADMIN_PASSWORD from the EspoCRM service's variables.
Change the password from within EspoCRM, or rotate it by editing that variable and redeploying.