---
title: "Deploy Firecrawl"
description: "Turn any website into LLM-ready Markdown with self-hosted Firecrawl"
category: "AI/ML"
url: https://railway.com/deploy/firecrawl-railway
---

# Deploy Firecrawl

Turn any website into LLM-ready Markdown with self-hosted Firecrawl

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

- **Creator:** A3A
- **Category:** AI/ML
- **Total deploys:** 1

## Template content

### nuq-worker https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/selfhst/icons/svg/firecrawl.svg

- **Image:** ghcr.io/firecrawl/firecrawl:latest
- **Start command:** `node dist/src/services/worker/nuq-worker.js`
- **Health check:** /health

### rabbitmq https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/homarr-labs/dashboard-icons/svg/rabbitmq.svg

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

### extract-worker https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/selfhst/icons/svg/firecrawl.svg

- **Image:** ghcr.io/firecrawl/firecrawl:latest
- **Start command:** `node dist/src/services/extract-worker.js`
- **Health check:** /health

### api https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/selfhst/icons/svg/firecrawl.svg

- **Image:** ghcr.io/firecrawl/firecrawl:latest
- **Start command:** `node dist/src/index.js`
- **Health check:** /v0/health/readiness

### Redis https://cdn.sanity.io/images/sy1jschh/production/0ce0bfdcfbdbf69662b1116671f97c2dd788b655-157x157.svg

- **Image:** redis:8.2
- **Start command:** `/bin/sh -c "rm -rf $RAILWAY_VOLUME_MOUNT_PATH/lost+found/ && exec docker-entrypoint.sh redis-server --requirepass $REDIS_PASSWORD --save 60 1 --dir $RAILWAY_VOLUME_MOUNT_PATH"`

### nuq-prefetch-worker https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/selfhst/icons/svg/firecrawl.svg

- **Image:** ghcr.io/firecrawl/firecrawl:latest
- **Start command:** `node dist/src/services/worker/nuq-prefetch-worker.js`
- **Health check:** /health

### nuq-reconciler-worker https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/selfhst/icons/svg/firecrawl.svg

- **Image:** ghcr.io/firecrawl/firecrawl:latest
- **Start command:** `node dist/src/services/worker/nuq-reconciler-worker.js`
- **Health check:** /health

### playwright-service https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/selfhst/icons/svg/firecrawl.svg

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

### worker https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/selfhst/icons/svg/firecrawl.svg

- **Image:** ghcr.io/firecrawl/firecrawl:latest
- **Start command:** `node dist/src/services/queue-worker.js`
- **Health check:** /liveness

### gateway https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/selfhst/icons/svg/firecrawl.svg

- **Source:** https://github.com/gridalpha/firecrawl-railway
- **Public domain:** Yes

### nuq-postgres https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/homarr-labs/dashboard-icons/svg/postgres.svg

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

## Documentation

![Firecrawl logo](https://mintlify.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/firecrawl/logo/logo.png)

# Deploy and Host Firecrawl on Railway

Firecrawl is an open-source web data API that turns any URL into clean, LLM-ready Markdown or structured JSON. It handles the parts of web scraping that usually eat an afternoon — JavaScript rendering, sitemap discovery, following links to a depth limit, stripping navigation and ads, respecting `robots.txt`, and returning page metadata with the content. Teams building RAG systems, AI agents and competitor monitoring use it as the ingestion layer in front of a vector database; it is the self-hostable alternative to Apify, Bright Data and Diffbot.

Self-host Firecrawl on Railway with the production topology already wired together: the REST API, five worker roles pulling jobs off a Postgres-backed queue, a headless Chromium renderer, RabbitMQ for job-completion notifications, and Redis for rate limiting. Because a self-hosted Firecrawl accepts any bearer token, this template does not expose the API directly — a Caddy gateway holds the only public domain, checks every request against an API key you control, and forwards it over the private network. Deploy Firecrawl and you get a working `https://` endpoint with an API key, not a checklist of hardening tasks.

![Firecrawl Railway architecture](https://res.cloudinary.com/rroe4rtk/image/upload/v1786826407/538af215-d523-4450-a770-19d804e9ab33.png)

## Getting Started with Firecrawl on Railway

There is no web UI — Firecrawl is an API, ready the moment the gateway service turns green. Open that service in Railway and copy two things: its public domain and its `FIRECRAWL_API_KEY`. Then ask it to scrape a page:

```
curl -X POST https://your-gateway-domain.up.railway.app/v2/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "formats": ["markdown"]}'
```

A healthy deployment answers `"success": true` with the page as Markdown; repeat the call without the header and it must return `401`. `POST /v2/map` returns every URL Firecrawl can discover on a domain, and `POST /v2/crawl` queues a multi-page job, returning an id you poll at `GET /v2/crawl/` until `status` reads `completed`. The official SDKs work unchanged against your host:

```
from firecrawl import Firecrawl

app = Firecrawl(api_key="YOUR_KEY", api_url="https://your-gateway-domain.up.railway.app")
docs = app.crawl("https://docs.example.com", limit=50)
```

## About Hosting Firecrawl

Firecrawl closes the gap between "a web page exists" and "a language model can read it". Point it at a URL and it fetches the page, renders JavaScript when needed, converts the DOM to Markdown and returns metadata such as HTTP status, title and canonical URL. Point it at a domain and it walks the sitemap and links, returning the same output per page. Teams self-host it when volume makes a metered SaaS expensive, when content is too sensitive for a third party, or to keep the crawler beside the vector database it feeds.

Key capabilities:

- **Scrape** a URL to Markdown, HTML, links, screenshots or structured JSON
- **Crawl** a site with depth, path and page-count limits, honouring `robots.txt`
- **Map** a domain to its discoverable URLs in one fast call
- **Batch scrape** many URLs in one job, with webhooks when it finishes
- **Extract** schema-defined fields; PDFs and DOCX parse automatically

The template splits Firecrawl's processes into separate services rather than one container. **api** answers HTTP and enqueues work; **nuq-worker** performs the scrapes; **worker** orchestrates crawls; **nuq-prefetch-worker** feeds jobs to workers and **nuq-reconciler-worker** returns abandoned ones to the queue; **extract-worker** handles schema extraction; **playwright-service** runs Chromium. **nuq-postgres** is the queue itself — Firecrawl's own PostgreSQL image with `pg_cron` and the queue schema baked in, so a plain Postgres cannot replace it. **RabbitMQ** carries completion notifications and **Redis** backs rate limiting.

## Why Deploy Firecrawl on Railway

Railway removes the operational work a self-hosted crawler usually adds.

- Eleven pre-wired services with private networking configured
- Persistent volumes for the queue database and broker survive redeploys
- Health checks everywhere, so a stuck worker restarts instead of idling
- Scaling per role — add scraping capacity without touching the API
- One public HTTPS domain with a managed certificate; backends stay private

## Common Use Cases

- **RAG ingestion:** crawl product docs on a schedule and push clean Markdown into a vector database
- **AI agents with live web access:** give an agent a `/v2/scrape` tool so it reads pages at request time, not from stale training data
- **Competitor and price monitoring:** map a catalogue, scrape each page, diff the output on a cron
- **Content migration:** convert a legacy site or wiki into Markdown for a static site generator

## Dependencies for Firecrawl

- `ghcr.io/firecrawl/firecrawl:latest` — API and every worker role
- `ghcr.io/firecrawl/playwright-service:latest` — headless Chromium renderer
- `ghcr.io/firecrawl/nuq-postgres:latest` — PostgreSQL 17 with `pg_cron` and the queue schema
- `rabbitmq:3-management` — job completion notifications
- Railway managed Redis — rate limiting and caching
- `caddy:2-alpine` from the gateway source repository — API key enforcement

### Environment Variables Reference

| Variable | Service | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| `FIRECRAWL_API_KEY` | gateway | Bearer token every client must send |
| `ENV` | Firecrawl roles | Must stay `local`; caps API workers to the container size |
| `USE_DB_AUTHENTICATION` | Firecrawl roles | `false` — Firecrawl's own auth needs Supabase |
| `CRAWL_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS` | Firecrawl roles | Pages fetched in parallel per crawl |
| `BLOCK_MEDIA` | workers, playwright | Skips images and video to save bandwidth |
| `OPENAI_API_KEY` | api, extract-worker | Set only for `/v2/extract` and `json` format |
| `SEARXNG_ENDPOINT` | api | Set only if you want `/v2/search` |

### Deployment Dependencies

- Source: [github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl](https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl)
- Self-hosting guide: [docs.firecrawl.dev/contributing/self-host](https://docs.firecrawl.dev/contributing/self-host)

## Hardware Requirements for Self-Hosting Firecrawl

Chromium is the expensive part; queue and API are modest.

| Resource | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 4 vCPU across services | 8 vCPU+ for parallel crawling |
| RAM | 6 GB total | 12 GB+, mostly renderer and workers |
| Storage | 5 GB for the queue database | 10 GB, plus 5 GB for the broker |
| Runtime | Node.js 22, PostgreSQL 17, Chromium | Same, with extra worker replicas |

Scale per role: raise replicas on `nuq-worker` and give `playwright-service` more memory when crawls back up. Leave `nuq-prefetch-worker` and `nuq-reconciler-worker` at one replica — both are singletons.

## Self-Hosting Firecrawl with Docker

Upstream ships a Compose file that runs every process in one container — the quickest local try:

```
git clone https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl.git
cd firecrawl
cp apps/api/.env.example .env
docker compose up -d
curl -X POST http://localhost:3002/v2/scrape -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "formats": ["markdown"]}'
```

That local stack is unauthenticated and keeps no volumes, so it suits evaluation and nothing public. Splitting those processes into separate services — each with its own health check, resources and replica count — plus the API key gateway, is what this template does for you.

## How Much Does Firecrawl Cost to Self-Host?

Firecrawl is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence, so there are no seat or page-credit fees. The hosted cloud starts free with a small credit allowance and moves to paid tiers as volume grows; self-hosting replaces that with infrastructure cost only. Two hosted conveniences — managed proxy rotation and the Fire-engine renderer — are not part of the open-source build.

## FAQ

**What is Firecrawl?**
An open-source API that scrapes and crawls websites, returning clean Markdown or structured JSON built for language models.

**What does this Railway template deploy?**
Eleven services: the Firecrawl API, five worker roles, a Playwright renderer, a queue database, RabbitMQ, Redis, and a Caddy gateway holding the public domain.

**How do I authenticate requests to a self-hosted Firecrawl?**
Self-hosted Firecrawl accepts any bearer token, so the gateway checks the `Authorization: Bearer` header against `FIRECRAWL_API_KEY`. Rotate the key by changing that variable; the gateway refuses to start if it is empty.

**Why does the template include Postgres, RabbitMQ and Redis?**
Postgres is the job queue Firecrawl schedules scrapes through, and needs the extensions in Firecrawl's own image. RabbitMQ notifies the API when a job finishes. Redis backs rate limiting.

**Does self-hosted Firecrawl respect robots.txt?**
Yes, unless a request opts out with `ignoreRobotsTxt`. You remain responsible for the terms of the sites you crawl.

**How do I enable LLM extraction on self-hosted Firecrawl?**
Set `OPENAI_API_KEY` on `api` and `extract-worker` — optionally with `OPENAI_BASE_URL` and `MODEL_NAME` for a compatible provider.


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