Deploy and Host Lemmy on Railway

Deploy a production-ready Lemmy instance on Railway. Lemmy is an open-source, federated link aggregator and forum—a self-hosted alternative to Reddit that participates in the Fediverse through ActivityPub.

About Hosting Lemmy

A Lemmy deployment needs an API and federation server, server-rendered web UI, PostgreSQL database, persistent image service, and a shared public origin. This template provisions those components as five Railway services connected through private networking. Only the Proxy service is publicly exposed.

The template pins matching Lemmy and Lemmy UI releases, generates independent administrator, media, and database secrets, and persists both application data and uploaded media across redeployments.

Why Deploy Lemmy on Railway?

Deploy the complete multi-service stack in one operation.
Keep PostgreSQL and Pict-rs data on persistent Railway volumes.
Route UI, API, media, and ActivityPub traffic through one HTTPS domain.
Use Railway private networking for all internal service communication.
Receive generated credentials instead of sharing template-wide secrets.
Inspect logs, metrics, deployments, and volume usage from one project.

Common Use Cases

Run a public federated discussion community.
Create a private or approval-only organization forum.
Host a topic-specific alternative to centralized social platforms.
Test ActivityPub federation and moderation workflows.
Operate a regional or community-owned social network.

Dependencies for Lemmy Hosting

The template includes every required server-side dependency:

Lemmy — API, federation, moderation, and background jobs
Lemmy UI — responsive server-rendered web interface
Pict-rs — persistent image uploads and thumbnails
Postgres — persistent application database
Proxy — one public HTTPS origin for UI, API, media, and federation

Deployment Dependencies

No external database or object-storage account is required. Railway provisions two persistent volumes: one for PostgreSQL and one for Pict-rs media. The two small adapter images are public and versioned on GHCR; the remaining services use pinned upstream images.

After deployment:

Open the generated Proxy domain.
Sign in with LEMMY_ADMIN_USERNAME and LEMMY_ADMIN_PASSWORD from the Lemmy service variables.
Change the generated administrator password.
Configure the site name, description, registration policy, and federation settings.
Optionally attach a custom domain to Proxy.

Choose the final domain before building a public community. ActivityPub identities are tied to the instance hostname and cannot be migrated by simply changing domains.