Deploy and Host Moodle on Railway

Moodle is the open-source learning management system used by universities, schools and corporate training teams: courses, enrolments, quizzes, assignments, grades, forums, certificates and a plugin directory of thousands of add-ons. This template runs Moodle 5.2.2 with PostgreSQL, and is packaged so the two things every other Moodle listing on Railway gets wrong actually work — the scheduled task runner, and persistence of anything you install or upload after the first deploy.

About Hosting Moodle

Moodle is a PHP application that expects three things a container platform does not give it for free. It needs its cron to run every minute: without it no email is ever sent, forum digests and course-completion never process, scheduled backups never happen, and the notifications page warns that the site is broken. It needs a writable webroot as well as a writable data directory, because plugins installed from the admin UI are written into the code tree, not into moodledata. And it needs to be told that TLS is terminated in front of it, or every generated URL comes out as http:// and browsers block the assets.

This image runs Moodle, nginx, PHP-FPM 8.3 and the Moodle cron worker under runit in a single service, mounts one volume over /var/www so both the webroot and moodledata are durable, repairs the volume's ownership on boot (Railway mounts volumes as uid 0 while the app runs unprivileged), honours Railway's injected $PORT, derives the site URL and the SSL-proxy setting from RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN, and sizes PHP-FPM's worker pool and the opcache from the container's own cgroup limits rather than a fixed guess. The admin password is generated per deploy and re-applied on every boot, so a redeploy doubles as a working password reset — useful, because a fresh Moodle has no mail server to send a reset link through.

Why Deploy Moodle 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 Moodle 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.

Common Use Cases

Run a school, university department or training provider's LMS without paying for MoodleCloud.
Host a private course catalogue for staff onboarding and compliance training, with completion tracking and certificates.
Stand up a disposable Moodle for plugin or theme development, where you install add-ons from the admin UI and expect them to still be there after the next deploy.

Dependencies for Moodle Hosting

A PostgreSQL database (included in this template as a second service, on its own volume).
A persistent volume for the application service, mounted at /var/www.

Deployment Dependencies

Moodle: https://moodle.org
Moodle docs: https://docs.moodle.org
Base image: https://github.com/erseco/alpine-moodle
This wrapper: https://github.com/bon5co/moodle-railway

Implementation Details

The deploy form asks for nothing. MOODLE_PASSWORD is generated per deployment, and the container refuses to boot if it is empty rather than starting with a guessable account. Sign in as admin with the generated password from the service's variables, then change it in the UI if you prefer.

Cron runs inside the same container once a minute. Plugins installed through Site administration → Plugins land on the volume and are preserved across image updates.