Deploy and Host onyx on Railway

Onyx is an open-source AI platform that connects to your team's documents, tickets, and messages so it can chat, search, and act with full context of your organization. It combines RAG-based chat with 40+ data connectors (Slack, Confluence, GitHub, Google Drive, and more), custom AI agents, and enterprise auth — deployable as a self-hosted alternative to closed AI assistants.

About Hosting onyx

Onyx is a multi-service application: a FastAPI backend, a Next.js frontend, a Celery-based background worker, and two dedicated ML model servers for embeddings and reranking, backed by Postgres, Redis, OpenSearch, and S3-compatible object storage. This template wires all ten services together on Railway's private network with a single public entry point behind nginx, so the whole stack comes up healthy with one deploy — no manual service linking, connection strings, or Docker Compose required.

Common Use Cases

Internal AI search and chat across company docs, wikis, tickets, and chat history
Self-hosted ChatGPT-style assistant with your own LLM provider and data connectors
Custom AI agents for support, engineering, or research teams that need RAG over private data

Dependencies for onyx Hosting

An API key from an LLM provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, or any LiteLLM-supported provider), added after first login

Deployment Dependencies

First Deploy

The first deploy takes noticeably longer than later ones. The API server runs Onyx's full database migration chain against an empty Postgres before it starts serving, and nginx sits waiting for the API and web services to become resolvable on the private network before it can pass its own check.

If nginx or api-server fails with a healthcheck error on that first deploy, open the service → Settings → Deploy → Healthcheck Timeout, raise it to 900 seconds, and redeploy. Railway's default is 300 seconds, which the initial migration run can exceed. Migrations only run once, so the retry comes up quickly and no further changes are needed.

Why Deploy onyx 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 onyx 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.