Deploy and Host hatchet-lite on Railway

Hatchet Lite is a lightweight, single-image distribution of Hatchet, an open-source distributed task queue and workflow orchestration engine backed by Y Combinator (W24). It bundles the Hatchet engine, REST API, gRPC server, admin CLI, and an embedded RabbitMQ broker into one container — ideal for development, testing, and low-to-medium throughput production workloads.

About Hosting hatchet-lite

Deploying hatchet-lite requires a running PostgreSQL database for persisting task state, workflow definitions, and execution history. This template provisions both services on Railway: a Postgres instance using Railway's SSL-enabled image and a hatchet-lite container from the official Hatchet registry. Railway handles networking between the two services automatically, so hatchet-lite can connect to Postgres via an internal DATABASE_URL without any manual configuration. The template lets you set an admin email address during deployment and automatically generates a secure admin password — no default credentials to worry about. The hatchet-lite image exposes a web dashboard on port 8888 and a gRPC endpoint on port 7077 for worker connections.

Common Use Cases

• Orchestrating background tasks and durable workflows for web applications (e.g. email pipelines, payment processing, data ingestion)
• Running and coordinating AI agent workflows, RAG pipelines, and LLM-powered task chains with built-in retry logic and timeout handling
• Scheduling recurring jobs and event-driven processing with full observability, concurrency controls, and DAG-style execution

Dependencies for hatchet-lite Hosting

• PostgreSQL — required as the primary datastore for task state, workflow metadata, and execution history
• hatchet-lite Docker image — the all-in-one container that runs the Hatchet engine, API, dashboard, and embedded message broker

Deployment Dependencies

• hatchet-lite (official Hatchet image): ghcr.io/hatchet-dev/hatchet/hatchet-lite
• PostgreSQL (official Railway image): ghcr.io/railwayapp-templates/postgres-ssl:17
• Hatchet self-hosting docs: https://docs.hatchet.run/self-hosting/hatchet-lite
• Hatchet configuration options: https://docs.hatchet.run/self-hosting/configuration-options

Implementation Details

The template configures the following variables on the hatchet-lite service:

• ADMIN_EMAIL — set by you during deployment, used to log in to the Hatchet dashboard
• ADMIN_PASSWORD — auto-generated by Railway at deploy time, available in the service's variable panel
• DATABASE_URL — auto-populated from the Postgres service via Railway's internal networking

Why Deploy hatchet-lite 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 hatchet-lite 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.