Deploy and Host Nginx RTMP on Railway

Nginx RTMP is an Nginx-based media streaming server for live video delivery. It supports RTMP publishing and HLS playback, making it suitable for receiving live streams from tools such as OBS and serving them to compatible video players. The nginx-rtmp-module also supports H264/AAC streaming and other live-media features.

About Hosting Nginx RTMP

Hosting Nginx RTMP on Railway involves deploying the tiangolo/nginx-rtmp:latest Docker image as a Railway service. The configuration listens for RTMP streams on port 1935 and serves the HLS output and web content over HTTP on port 80. Railway provides the networking layer needed to expose both endpoints publicly. HLS segments are generated under /tmp/hls, so persistent storage is not required for the documented configuration. No database or runtime environment variables are required. Once deployed, you can generate a Railway domain for HTTP access and use a TCP proxy for RTMP publishing.

Common Use Cases

Live video streaming from OBS or other RTMP-compatible broadcasting software
Self-hosted HLS streaming for web-based video playback
Development and testing of RTMP and HLS streaming workflows

Dependencies for Nginx RTMP

tiangolo/nginx-rtmp:latest Docker image
OBS Studio or another RTMP-compatible streaming client

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Docker

The template uses the following Docker image:

tiangolo/nginx-rtmp:latest

Railway deploys the prebuilt image directly, so no custom build or start command is required.

Public Networking

Configure the following ports:

Protocol	Proxy Type	Target Port	Purpose
HTTP	HTTP Proxy	80	Web content and HLS playback
RTMP	TCP Proxy	1935	RTMP stream ingestion

After deployment, generate a Railway domain for port 80. For RTMP publishing, use the TCP proxy generated for port 1935.

Streaming Configuration

The RTMP application is available at the /live path. A compatible streaming client can publish using an endpoint similar to:

rtmp://:/live

The stream key is appended to the RTMP URL when publishing.

HLS output is generated at:

/tmp/hls

and can be accessed through the HTTP service using:

https:///hls/stream.m3u8

The supplied configuration has recording disabled, so no persistent volume is required.

Why Deploy Nginx RTMP 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 Nginx RTMP 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.