Deploy and Host Huly on Railway

Huly is an open-source, all-in-one project management platform from Hardcore Engineering. It combines issue tracking in the style of Linear or Jira with team chat, shared documents, a knowledge base, planning and HR tools in one workspace. Teams self-host it to keep their project data on their own infrastructure.

About Hosting Huly

Huly runs as a set of cooperating services: the web front end, an account service, the transactor that streams live changes over WebSockets, a collaborator for real-time document editing, a workspace service that creates and upgrades workspaces, full-text indexing with rekoni for attachments, and a stats service. They store data in CockroachDB, pass events through Redpanda (Kafka-compatible), index text in Elasticsearch and keep files in S3-compatible storage. This template wires all of that together on Railway's private network, puts the data on volumes and a Railway bucket, and exposes everything through one gateway domain. Expect about 2.5 GB of RAM at idle.

Common Use Cases

Issue tracking, sprints and milestones for software teams as a Linear or Jira alternative
Team chat, direct messages and shared documents in the same workspace as the tasks
A self-hosted knowledge base and planner for teams that need to keep data in-house

Dependencies for Huly Hosting

CockroachDB (single node, on a volume) for accounts and workspace data
Redpanda for the event queue and Elasticsearch 7 for full-text search
A Railway bucket (S3-compatible) for files and attachments

Deployment Dependencies

Huly platform release v0.7.426: https://github.com/hcengineering/platform/releases/tag/v0.7.426
Upstream self-host setup: https://github.com/hcengineering/huly-selfhost
Start scripts used by this template: https://github.com/aalfath/huly-railway-template

Implementation Details

First login: the account service creates the owner account on first start from HULY_ADMIN_EMAIL and HULY_ADMIN_PASSWORD (generated; find it in the account service variables). Log in at your Railway domain, then create your first workspace.
Sign-up is closed: public sign-up is switched off in the account service itself, not only hidden in the UI. Add people to a workspace with invite links from the workspace settings.
Admin: the owner email is also set as Huly's admin, which opens the admin pages for managing workspaces.
Gateway: the public huly service is a Caddy reverse proxy that routes /_accounts, /_transactor, /_collaborator, /_rekoni and /_stats to the private services, like upstream's nginx config.
Not included: e-mail (password reset by e-mail and e-mail invites), video calls (LiveKit), AI bot and GitHub or Telegram integrations. Upstream documents how to add them.
Images: all images are pinned by version and digest (Huly v0.7.426, CockroachDB v24.2.10, Redpanda v24.3.18, Elasticsearch 7.14.2, Caddy 2.11.9). To upgrade, change the Huly image tags together; the workspace service migrates data on start.

Why Deploy Huly 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 Huly 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.