Deploy and Host Novu (Self-Hosted Knock & Courier Alternative) on Railway

Novu is an open-source notification infrastructure — a self-hosted alternative to notification-as-a-service platforms like Knock, Courier and OneSignal that you fully own. Send transactional and product notifications across email, SMS, push, chat and a drop-in in-app inbox from a single API and a visual workflow editor, with subscriber management, preferences, digests and provider routing built in. This template deploys the complete Novu self-hosted stack — the API server, the background worker, the WebSocket service that powers the real-time in-app inbox, and the management dashboard, backed by MongoDB and Redis — each pinned to a verified upstream image and wired over Railway's private network so it comes up working on the first deploy.

About Hosting Novu (Self-Hosted Knock & Courier Alternative)

Novu is a multi-service application: a NestJS API, a Bull/Redis-backed worker that executes notification workflows and digests, a WebSocket service that streams real-time updates to the in-app notification center, and a React dashboard for building workflows and managing subscribers, all backed by MongoDB for persistence and Redis for queues and caching. The API, WebSocket service and dashboard are exposed publicly; the worker runs privately, and every service talks to MongoDB and Redis over Railway's private network. This template configures each connection string, generates fresh application secrets on every deploy (JWT signing key, store encryption key and API secret key), shares the encryption key from the API to the worker automatically, and attaches a persistent volume to MongoDB. When it finishes deploying you open the dashboard, create the first admin account, and start building notification workflows.

Common Use Cases

A self-hosted notification service for product and transactional messages — welcome emails, receipts, alerts and digests — sent across email, SMS, push and chat from one unified API
A drop-in in-app notification center (inbox/bell) for a web or mobile app, with real-time updates powered by the included WebSocket service
A Knock, Courier or OneSignal replacement for teams that need subscriber data, notification content and delivery logs to stay on their own infrastructure

Dependencies for Novu (Self-Hosted Knock & Courier Alternative) Hosting

MongoDB 8 for all application data — workflows, subscribers, messages and logs (included)
Redis for the notification job queues, digests and caching (included)

No external services are required to deploy. To actually deliver notifications you add your own delivery-provider credentials (an SMTP server or an email/SMS/push provider such as SendGrid, Postmark, Twilio or Firebase) from the dashboard's integration store after the first-run setup. File attachments use an S3-compatible store, which you can point at any provider by updating the pre-set S3 variables.

Why Deploy Novu (Self-Hosted Knock & Courier Alternative) on Railway?

Railway's private networking, per-service volumes and one-click deploys make running Novu's four-service architecture practical without writing Docker Compose or hand-wiring queues and WebSockets. This template pins every image to a verified tag, generates fresh secrets per deploy, and connects the API, worker, WebSocket service and dashboard to MongoDB and Redis automatically over the private network — with the dashboard pointed at the public API and WebSocket domains — so a working, persistent Novu instance is a few clicks away, and each service scales independently as your notification volume grows.