Deploy and Host OpenPanel on Railway

OpenPanel is open-source product and web analytics, an alternative to Mixpanel, Amplitude and Google Analytics. It tracks events from websites, apps and backends, and shows real-time dashboards, funnels, retention, user profiles and sessions. It can run without cookies, and its SDKs cover JavaScript, React, Next.js, React Native, iOS, Android and server-side languages.

About Hosting OpenPanel

Self-hosted OpenPanel is three apps (an API that ingests events and serves the dashboard's backend, a web dashboard, and a worker that batches events into ClickHouse) with three databases: ClickHouse for events and profiles, PostgreSQL for users and projects, and Redis for queues. The apps need the Postgres and ClickHouse migrations run before they start, OpenPanel's defaults expect an IPv4 network, its login cookie is set for the parent domain (which browsers reject on shared hosting domains), and a fresh install lets the first visitor sign up as the admin.

This template runs OpenPanel's official images behind one public Caddy proxy. It creates your admin account at deploy, closes sign-up, pins the login cookie to your domain, and keeps all three databases private on volumes. The API runs migrations on every start, ClickHouse runs with small internal log tables, and every version is pinned and tested.

Common Use Cases

Product analytics for SaaS apps: events, funnels, retention and user profiles, without sending data to a third party
Privacy-friendly web analytics for sites and blogs, with real-time visitors, pages, sources and countries
Mobile app analytics with the React Native, iOS and Android SDKs
Server-side event tracking from your backend with a client secret
A self-hosted Mixpanel or Google Analytics alternative with your data on your own infrastructure

Dependencies for OpenPanel Hosting

ClickHouse 25.10
PostgreSQL 17
Redis 8

Deployment Dependencies

OpenPanel: https://github.com/Openpanel-dev/openpanel
Self-hosting docs: https://openpanel.dev/docs/self-hosting/self-hosting
SDKs: https://openpanel.dev/docs

Implementation Details

What you set: ADMIN_EMAIL, the email you log in with.

After deploy:

Open the OpenPanel URL and log in with ADMIN_EMAIL and the generated ADMIN_PASSWORD (API service → Variables).
Create an organization and a project, and copy the client ID (and secret for app/backend projects).
Add the SDK to your site or app with apiUrl: 'https:///api'.

This template:

Creates the admin account at deploy and closes public sign-up; teammates join by invitation
Pins the login cookie to your dashboard's host, so login works on *.up.railway.app
Runs on Railway's IPv6 private network (API on ::, Redis client with family=0)
Keeps ClickHouse, PostgreSQL and Redis private, with no public domain or TCP proxy
Runs the Postgres and ClickHouse migrations on every start, so upgrades need no manual step
Tunes ClickHouse for a small service: high-volume internal logs off, fewer query threads
Routes /api to the API and everything else to the dashboard through one domain, keeping the visitor's real IP for geolocation
Pins OpenPanel 2.3.0, ClickHouse 25.10, PostgreSQL 17, Redis 8.10 and Caddy 2.10

Notes: the seven services idle at about 1.7 GB of RAM together. Email (invitations, password resets) needs a Resend API key; without it, everything else works. For a custom domain, update DASHBOARD_URL, API_URL and CUSTOM_COOKIE_DOMAIN (see the README).

Why Deploy OpenPanel 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 OpenPanel 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.