Deploy and Host FOSSBilling on Railway

FOSSBilling is an open-source billing and client-management platform for hosting providers and IT businesses. It handles invoices, orders, support tickets, and automation around products and services. You run it on a PHP stack with a relational database and scheduled tasks so recurring billing and reminders stay reliable.

About Hosting FOSSBilling

Hosting FOSSBilling means running a long-lived PHP application behind a web server, keeping PHP-FPM available for requests, and running periodic jobs (for example invoicing and maintenance). You also need a MySQL-compatible database for configuration and data. This template ships a Docker image that bundles FOSSBilling with Nginx, PHP 8.4-FPM, Supervisor (to run Nginx, PHP-FPM, and cron together), and system cron executing cron.php every five minutes. MySQL is preconfigured in the template, so you connect the app during the web installer instead of provisioning the database service yourself. Railway injects PORT for Nginx; on first start the entrypoint can populate /app from the bundled application files when a volume is empty. After deploy, open your Railway URL and complete FOSSBilling’s setup wizard.

Common Use Cases

• Web hosting & VPS providers — sell and bill recurring services with client portals and automation.
• Agencies and IT shops — centralize quotes, invoices, and support for multiple customers.
• Internal billing — track products, subscriptions, and payments with a self-hosted stack.

Dependencies for FOSSBilling Hosting

• MySQL (or MariaDB-compatible) — required; provided and pre-wired in this Railway template.
• PHP runtime — 8.4-FPM with common extensions (see implementation details).
• Web server — Nginx in front of PHP-FPM; Supervisor supervises processes; cron for scheduled PHP tasks.

Deployment Dependencies

• FOSSBilling — project home and documentation
• FOSSBilling Docker image — upstream image used as the application source in the multi-stage build
• Railway — hosting and environment variables (e.g. PORT)

Implementation Details

Multi-stage Dockerfile: stage one copies /var/www/html from fossbilling/fossbilling:latest; stage two is php:8.4-fpm with Nginx, cron, and Supervisor. PHP extensions include intl, pdo_mysql, gd (FreeType, JPEG, PNG, WebP, XPM, AVIF), bz2, and imagick. Nginx and PHP-FPM run as unprivileged appuser (uid 1001); Nginx uses cap_net_bind_service to bind the listening port.

Why Deploy FOSSBilling 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 FOSSBilling 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.