---
title: "Deploy Firecrawl"
description: "Firecrawl web scraping API with Playwright, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Postgres"
category: "AI/ML"
url: https://railway.com/deploy/firecrawl-2
---

# Deploy Firecrawl

Firecrawl web scraping API with Playwright, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Postgres

**[Deploy Firecrawl on Railway](https://railway.com/template/firecrawl-2)**

Machine-readable deploy manifest (JSON, validated by TemplateCI): https://railway.com/deploy/firecrawl-2/manifest.json

- **Creator:** Protemplate
- **Category:** AI/ML
- **Total deploys:** 2

## Template content

### Firecrawl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/firecrawl/firecrawl/main/img/firecrawl_logo.png

- **Image:** ghcr.io/firecrawl/firecrawl:2.11.322
- **Start command:** `bash -c 'for t in "$POSTGRES_HOST:5432" "$RABBITMQ_HOST:5672" "$REDIS_HOST:6379"; do h="${t%:*}"; p="${t##*:}"; n=0; until (exec 3<>"/dev/tcp/$h/$p") 2>/dev/null; do n=$((n+1)); if [ "$n" -ge 150 ]; then echo "gave up waiting for $t"; break; fi; echo "waiting for $t"; sleep 2; done; done; exec node dist/src/harness.js --start-docker'`
- **Health check:** /v0/health/readiness
- **Public domain:** Yes

### RabbitMQ https://devicons.railway.app/i/rabbitmq.svg

- **Image:** rabbitmq:3-management

### Redis https://devicons.railway.app/i/redis.svg

- **Image:** redis:7-alpine
- **Start command:** `sh -c 'docker-entrypoint.sh redis-server --requirepass "$REDIS_PASSWORD" --save 60 1 --dir /data --bind :: 0.0.0.0'`

### Playwright https://devicons.railway.app/i/playwright.svg

- **Image:** ghcr.io/firecrawl/playwright-service:latest
- **Health check:** /health

### Postgres https://devicons.railway.app/i/postgresql.svg

- **Image:** ghcr.io/firecrawl/nuq-postgres:latest

## Documentation

# Deploy and Host Firecrawl with Railway

Firecrawl is the open-source web scraping and crawling API behind firecrawl.dev. Give it a URL and it returns clean markdown, HTML, links, page metadata, or LLM-extracted JSON, with a job queue for whole-site crawls. It is the data-ingestion layer for RAG pipelines, agents, and search indexes.

## About Hosting Firecrawl

Self-hosting Firecrawl means running its API and background workers next to four supporting services: a Playwright (headless Chromium) renderer, Redis, RabbitMQ, and a Postgres database with `pg_cron` that holds the NuQ job queue. This template deploys the same five services as the official `docker-compose.yaml`: the pinned `ghcr.io/firecrawl/firecrawl:2.11.322` image runs the API and all workers through the upstream harness, and the official `playwright-service` and `nuq-postgres` images are used as-is. Every connection string is wired over Railway's private IPv6 network with explicit ports, passwords are generated at deploy time, the API binds dual-stack so healthchecks pass, and Redis and Postgres get volumes.

## Common Use Cases

- **LLM-ready markdown** for RAG and fine-tuning datasets from documentation sites, blogs, and knowledge bases
- **Site crawls** that follow links and return every page as structured data via `/v1/crawl`
- **Agent tooling**: give an AI agent a scrape/crawl/map tool without paying per page
- **Structured extraction** with `/v1/extract` when you add an OpenAI-compatible key
- **Search-backed retrieval** with `/v1/search` when paired with a SearXNG instance on the same private network

## Dependencies for Firecrawl Hosting

- **Playwright service** (included): renders JavaScript-heavy pages
- **Redis** (included): caching, locks, rate limiting
- **RabbitMQ** (included): job notifications and webhook queues
- **NuQ Postgres** (included): Postgres 17 + `pg_cron` with the queue schema, persisted on a volume
- **OpenAI-compatible model** (optional): only for `/v1/extract`, the `json` format, and other LLM features

### Deployment Dependencies

- [Firecrawl self-hosting guide](https://docs.firecrawl.dev/contributing/self-host)
- [SELF_HOST.md in the repository](https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl/blob/main/SELF_HOST.md)
- [Firecrawl API reference](https://docs.firecrawl.dev/api-reference/introduction)
- [Firecrawl GitHub repository](https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl)

### Implementation Details

First steps after the deploy turns green:

1. Open the Firecrawl service and wait for `/v0/health/readiness` to return 200 (first boot pulls a large image and starts about ten worker processes).
2. Run a scrape against your Railway domain:

```bash
curl -X POST https:///v1/scrape \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "formats": ["markdown"]}'
```

Expected shape: `{"success": true, "data": {"markdown": "# Example Domain ...", "metadata": {"statusCode": 200}}}`. `/v2/scrape`, `/v1/crawl`, and `/v1/map` are available too. SDKs require a non-empty key; any string works because the template runs with `USE_DB_AUTHENTICATION=false`.

Key variables (all pre-wired; change only if you know why):

```env
PORT=3002
HOST=::
USE_DB_AUTHENTICATION=false
REDIS_URL=${{Redis.REDIS_URL}}
PLAYWRIGHT_MICROSERVICE_URL=http://${{Playwright.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:${{Playwright.PORT}}/scrape
POSTGRES_HOST=${{Postgres.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}
NUQ_RABBITMQ_URL=${{RabbitMQ.RABBITMQ_PRIVATE_URL}}
NUQ_WORKER_COUNT=5
BULL_AUTH_KEY=${{secret(32)}}
OPENAI_API_KEY=            # optional, enables /v1/extract and json format
```

Self-hosted Firecrawl has no built-in authentication: anyone with the public URL can use it. Either remove the public domain and call it from your other Railway services at `http://${{Firecrawl.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:${{Firecrawl.PORT}}`, or place an authenticating proxy in front. Screenshots, page actions, and agent/browser features need Firecrawl's Fire-engine and are not part of the open-source stack. Lower `NUQ_WORKER_COUNT` and Playwright's `MAX_CONCURRENT_PAGES` on small plans.

## Why Deploy Firecrawl 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 Firecrawl on Railway, you get the complete official stack (API, workers, Playwright, Redis, RabbitMQ, Postgres) with generated secrets, healthchecks, persistent volumes, managed SSL, and private networking to the rest of your project, ready to feed your agents and RAG pipelines.


## Similar templates

- [Chat Chat](https://railway.com/deploy/-WWW5r) — Chat Chat, your own unified chat and search to AI platform.
- [stella](https://railway.com/deploy/stella) — Self-host stella with web, API, Postgres, Redis, and object storage.
- [Hermes Agent | OpenClaw Alternative with Dashboard](https://railway.com/deploy/hermes-agent-or-openclaw-alternative-wit) — Self-Hosted Hermes AI Agent for Telegram, Discord & Slack

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