Deploy and Host Inngest Production Template on Railway

Inngest is an event-driven durable execution platform that enables developers to build reliable, multi-step workflows and background jobs without managing infrastructure. It provides automatic retries, state management, scheduling, and observability for complex serverless functions and AI workflows.

About Hosting Inngest Production Template

Deploying Inngest in production involves running a self-hosted server with external Postgres for persistent storage and Redis for queue and state management. The architecture includes an Event API for receiving events, a Runner for scheduling function executions, a Queue system for flow control, an Executor for running functions, and a Dashboard UI for management and monitoring. This production-ready setup uses pinned container images for stability, external databases for scalability beyond single-node deployments, and proper authentication via event keys and signing keys. The template configures all components to work together seamlessly, providing enterprise-grade reliability for workflow orchestration.

Common Use Cases

Background Jobs & Workflows: Process asynchronous tasks like email sending, data processing, report generation, and batch operations with automatic retries and state persistence
AI Agent Orchestration: Build reliable AI workflows with multi-step LLM calls, tool usage, memory management, and streaming updates to users
Event-Driven Automation: Create scheduled cron jobs, webhook handlers, and event-triggered workflows with built-in concurrency control, throttling, and rate limiting

Dependencies for Inngest Production Template Hosting

PostgreSQL Database: Required for persistent storage of system configuration, function definitions, event history, and execution state
Redis Instance: Required for queue management, state storage, and caching to enable high-performance workflow orchestration
Docker/Container Runtime: For running the Inngest server container with pinned image versions
Event Key & Signing Key: Hexadecimal authentication keys for securing communication between SDKs and the Inngest server

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Required Environment Variables:

# Authentication (must be hexadecimal strings)
INNGEST_EVENT_KEY=your_event_key_here
INNGEST_SIGNING_KEY=your_signing_key_here

# External Database Connections
DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:password@postgres-host:5432/inngest
REDIS_URL=redis://redis-host:6379

# Server Configuration
INNGEST_PORT=8288
INNGEST_LOG_LEVEL=info

Starting the Inngest Server:

inngest start \
  --postgres-uri="$DATABASE_URL" \
  --redis-uri="$REDIS_URL" \
  --event-key="$INNGEST_EVENT_KEY" \
  --signing-key="$INNGEST_SIGNING_KEY" \
  --port=8288

Connecting Your Application:

Your application must expose Inngest functions via an HTTP endpoint at /api/inngest using the serve() handler from the Inngest SDK. After deployment, sync your app with the Inngest server by providing your app's URL in the dashboard.

Why Deploy Inngest Production Template 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 Inngest Production Template 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.

With Railway's managed Postgres and Redis services, you get automatic backups, monitoring, and scaling for your Inngest deployment. The platform handles container orchestration, networking, and SSL certificates, letting you focus on building reliable workflows instead of managing infrastructure. Railway's one-click deployment with pinned container images ensures reproducible, stable production environments for your mission-critical background jobs and AI workflows.