Deploy and Host Flowcms on Railway

Flow CMS is an open-source, AI-powered, self-hostable headless CMS. It pairs content modeling and a fast delivery API with an AI tool suite (bring your own provider keys), an SEO/AEO suite, media, messaging, webhooks, and an agent API, so any website, app, or AI agent can read and write your content.

About Hosting Flowcms

This template runs the all-in-one Flow CMS image (admin studio, headless API, and reverse proxy in one service) alongside a managed PostgreSQL database. On deploy, Railway auto-generates the encryption and session secrets, wires the database connection over private networking, and runs the database migrations on first boot. There is no default admin account: you open the generated URL and create your own admin in the first-run /welcome wizard. Postgres data persists on a volume. Because container storage is ephemeral, point media uploads at an S3-compatible bucket (Cloudflare R2, Supabase Storage, or S3) for production use.

Common Use Cases

A headless content backend for a Next.js, Astro, or mobile front end via the delivery API
AI-assisted content production and SEO/AEO optimization with your own model keys
A single content API serving multiple sites, apps, and AI agents

Dependencies for Flowcms Hosting

PostgreSQL database (provisioned by this template)
S3-compatible object storage for persistent media in production (optional, recommended)

Deployment Dependencies

Source and documentation: https://github.com/flowcms-co/flowcms
Deploy guide: https://github.com/flowcms-co/flowcms/blob/main/docs/DEPLOY.md
Self-host installer: https://get.flowcms.co

Implementation Details

The app service requires only these variables (all set for you by the template):

DATABASE_URL references the bundled Postgres service
SECRETS_ENCRYPTION_KEY and JWT_SECRET are auto-generated per deployment
NODE_ENV=production and PORT=8080

For persistent media, add S3 variables in the service settings: STORAGE_DRIVER=s3, S3_BUCKET, S3_ENDPOINT, S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID, S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, S3_REGION, S3_PUBLIC_URL.

Why Deploy Flowcms 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 horiz

By deploying Flowcms on Railway, you are one step closer -stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers,databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.