Deploy LimeSurvey

Deploy and Host

LimeSurvey is a free, open-source survey platform — a self-hosted alternative to SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Qualtrics. Deploy it on Railway in one click: the app plus a PostgreSQL 16 companion, persistent volumes for uploads and the database, and a zero-field deploy form. The admin account is created automatically on first boot — sign in with username admin and the generated password.

About Hosting

Hosting LimeSurvey on Railway means a PHP + Apache app service talking to a PostgreSQL 16 companion over the private network, with the database on a persistent volume and survey uploads plus the generated encryption config on an app volume. The wrapper waits for the database, generates its configuration from the environment, and runs LimeSurvey's own CLI installer on first boot only — creating the schema and the admin account — so redeploys and restarts never wipe or re-install anything. The public URL is derived at boot from the live Railway domain, so survey links and invitations always carry the correct address. Railway terminates TLS at the edge; the app's plain HTTP listener serves the full UI and API.

Why Deploy

• Full survey engine, no subscription: unlimited surveys, questions, and responses on your own infrastructure.
• Branching and logic: conditions, relevance equations, question groups, quotas, and assessments without a paid tier.
• Participant management: token tables, invitation and reminder emails, and closed-access surveys.
• Analysis built in: response statistics, charts, and CSV/SPSS/R exports — no third-party analytics needed.
• Privacy: responses live in your own PostgreSQL database, not on a survey vendor's servers.

Common Use Cases

• Customer and employee feedback surveys
• Academic and market research questionnaires
• Event registration and evaluation forms
• Course and training assessments
• Community polls with token-controlled access

Dependencies for

LimeSurvey needs a PostgreSQL database and a writable upload directory; both are provided by this template (companion service plus volumes), so there is nothing else to provision.

Deployment Dependencies

• Railway Hobby plan or higher (two services, two volumes).
• Memory at rest: roughly 300–500 MB for the app plus PostgreSQL; the app is always on, so usage accrues while idle as well as under load.
• Env var reference: ADMIN_PASSWORD (generated, initial admin password), DB_HOST (auto-wired companion host), DB_PASSWORD (auto-wired from the companion), POSTGRES_PASSWORD (generated, companion password). Baked constants: DB_TYPE=pgsql, DB_PORT=5432, DB_NAME/DB_USERNAME=limesurvey, DB_TABLE_PREFIX=lime_, ADMIN_NAME, ADMIN_EMAIL, DEBUG=0. Optional upstream settings after deploy: BASE_URL, HOST_INFO, URL_FORMAT, SHOW_SCRIPT_NAME, TABLE_SESSION, DEBUG_SQL, and the ENCRYPT_* keys (leave unset — the wrapper persists the app-generated security.php on the volume instead).