Deploy and Host Odoo with Railway

Odoo is an open-source suite of business apps: CRM, sales, inventory, invoicing, website, e-commerce, project, helpdesk and more, all on one database. This community template deploys Odoo 20 Community from the official image on Railway with Postgres, production worker mode, a persistent filestore and a secured database manager.

About Hosting Odoo

A production Odoo server runs several worker processes for web requests, a cron worker for scheduled actions and a separate gevent process for WebSockets (live chat, Discuss, notifications), behind a reverse proxy that sends /websocket to the gevent port. It needs Postgres and a persistent data directory for attachments and sessions. This template runs Odoo and a small nginx in one service with a volume for the data directory, renders odoo.conf from Railway variables, creates the database on first boot with a generated administrator password, disables the public database manager and pins the database filter. Postgres runs as its own service.

Common Use Cases

Running CRM and sales quotations for a growing company without per-user SaaS fees
Managing inventory, warehouses and purchase orders together with invoicing
Publishing a company website or simple web shop backed by the same product catalogue
Starting a self-hosted ERP that grows by installing additional Odoo apps over time

Dependencies for Odoo Hosting

Odoo 20 Community (official odoo:20.0-20260926 image, extended with nginx)
PostgreSQL (Railway Postgres 18, superuser odoo)
Persistent volume for /var/lib/odoo (filestore and sessions)

Deployment Dependencies

Odoo official Docker image: https://hub.docker.com/_/odoo
Odoo deployment guide (workers, proxy mode, WebSocket routing): https://www.odoo.com/documentation/master/administration/on_premise/deploy.html
Odoo Community source: https://github.com/odoo/odoo
Railway Postgres: https://docs.railway.com/databases/postgresql

Implementation Details

Service	Image	Role
Odoo	built from `services/odoo` (`odoo:20.0-20260926` + nginx)	nginx on the public domain; Odoo HTTP workers, cron worker and WebSocket worker on localhost; filestore volume
Postgres	`ghcr.io/railwayapp-templates/postgres-ssl:18`	Database (volume)

First login: open the public URL and sign in with ODOO_ADMIN_LOGIN and the generated ODOO_ADMIN_PASSWORD from the Odoo service variables. Install the apps you need from the Apps menu. The database manager is disabled; to back up or restore from the UI, set ODOO_LIST_DB=True temporarily and use the generated ODOO_MASTER_PASSWORD.

Scaling: raise ODOO_WORKERS (about two per vCPU plus one) and the service memory; keep (workers + cron + 1) × ODOO_DB_MAXCONN below Postgres' connection limit. The service owns the filestore volume, so it scales vertically.

Versions: the Odoo build is pinned in services/odoo/Dockerfile. Newer 20.0 builds can be pinned there (run ODOO_UPDATE_MODULES=all once if needed). Moving to a new major version requires a database migration first.

Why Deploy Odoo on Railway?

Railway gives Odoo a managed Postgres, a persistent volume and an HTTPS domain in one project, with usage-based billing and simple vertical scaling. You get a production-mode Odoo with WebSockets and a locked-down database manager without running your own server or proxy.