Deploy and Host Oracle Database Free on Railway

Oracle Database Free is the free edition of Oracle AI Database 26ai: a full-featured relational database with SQL, PL/SQL, JSON, spatial and vector/AI capabilities. It is free under Oracle's Free Use Terms and Conditions, capped at 12 GB of user data, 2 GB of database RAM and 2 CPU threads per instance.

About Hosting Oracle Database Free

Railway can't pull directly from Oracle's container registry, so this template wraps the official Oracle Database Free image (the ~0.9 GB -lite flavor) in a small Dockerfile. First boot expands Oracle's prebuilt data files into a Railway volume, so the database is ready in minutes instead of a long DBCA install. The database listens on port 1521, is reachable over Railway's private network (or an optional TCP proxy), and uses FREEPDB1 as the service name. A volume mounted at /opt/oracle/oradata keeps data across redeploys. Deploying requires a Hobby plan or higher with at least 2 GB RAM.

Common Use Cases

Development, staging and CI databases for SQL, PL/SQL and Oracle-specific features.
Sandboxed SQL, JSON, spatial or vector/AI playgrounds, with one schema per sandbox in FREEPDB1.
Testing migrations, query plans and schema changes against a real Oracle instance before touching production.
Backing an application that runs on the same Railway private network.

Dependencies for Oracle Database Free Hosting

Railway Hobby plan or higher with at least 2 GB RAM — the Free/Trial plan caps services at 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB, below Oracle's minimum.
A Railway volume of at least 5 GB mounted at /opt/oracle/oradata (Oracle Free caps user data at 12 GB).
Optional: a TCP proxy on port 1521 if clients outside Railway need to connect.

Implementation Details

Connect with the generated ORACLE_PWD as SYS, SYSTEM or PDBADMIN:

SID:            FREE
PDB / service:  FREEPDB1
Port:           1521
Character set:  AL32UTF8

sqlplus system/"$ORACLE_PWD"@//.railway.internal:1521/FREEPDB1
jdbc:oracle:thin:@//.railway.internal:1521/FREEPDB1

The optional APP_USER / APP_USER_PASSWORD variables provision an application schema in FREEPDB1 at startup.

Why Deploy Oracle Database Free 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 Oracle Database Free 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.