Deploy and Host OpenClaw on Railway

OpenClaw is an open-source, self-hosted personal AI agent that connects powerful AI models like Claude, GPT, and Gemini to your messaging apps and local tools. It runs as a persistent gateway, executing tasks, managing files, automating workflows, and maintaining memory — all on infrastructure you control.

About Hosting OpenClaw

Hosting OpenClaw involves running a long-lived Node.js gateway process that stays online 24/7 to handle incoming messages and execute tasks autonomously. This template wraps the OpenClaw gateway with a browser-based setup wizard, so you can configure your AI provider, messaging channels, and credentials without needing SSH or CLI access. A Railway Volume is required to persist your configuration, agent memory, and workspace across redeploys. Once live, the gateway is accessible via your Railway-assigned domain, with the setup wizard at /setup and the Control UI at /openclaw.

Common Use Cases

Personal AI Assistant — Chat with Claude or GPT via Telegram, Discord, or the web UI to automate daily tasks, answer questions, and execute commands on your behalf around the clock.
Automated Workflow Scheduling — Use OpenClaw's HEARTBEAT feature to schedule recurring tasks such as web scraping, file processing, API calls, and notifications without writing any code.
DevOps & Infrastructure Monitoring — Leverage the built-in terminal and gateway to monitor server logs, trigger health checks, and respond to infrastructure events through a familiar chat interface.

Dependencies for OpenClaw Hosting

LLM API Key — An API key from Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (GPT), Google (Gemini), or any OpenRouter-compatible provider to power the agent's reasoning and responses.
Railway Volume mounted at /data — Persistent storage for OpenClaw's config, credentials, agent memory, and workspace files. Without this, all state is lost on redeploy.

Deployment Dependencies

OpenClaw GitHub Repository — Source code and full documentation for the OpenClaw agent framework.
Anthropic API Keys — Recommended LLM provider (Claude models).
OpenAI API Keys — Alternative LLM provider (GPT models).
Railway Volumes Guide — Required for persisting OpenClaw state across redeploys.
Railway Variables Guide — For setting SETUP_PASSWORD, your API key, and other config securely.
Telegram BotFather — Create a Telegram bot token if you want to interact with OpenClaw via Telegram.
Discord Developer Portal — Create a Discord bot if you want to interact via Discord.

Implementation Details

The template runs a Node.js wrapper on Railway's injected $PORT (default 8080) that reverse-proxies HTTP and WebSocket traffic to the internal OpenClaw gateway on 127.0.0.1:18789:

Why Deploy openclaw 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 openclaw 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.