Deploy and Host osTicket on Railway

osTicket is a widely-adopted, open-source support ticket system that turns email, phone and web-based inquiries into a simple, unified online helpdesk. Lightweight and self-hosted, it includes a customer self-service portal, a powerful agent panel, custom fields, SLAs, canned responses and rich reporting — all under your full control.

About Hosting osTicket

This template deploys osTicket 1.18 on Railway backed by a MariaDB database and a dedicated cron service that runs scheduled tasks every 5 minutes. The web service runs nginx + PHP-FPM on port 8080 and auto-seeds a fresh install on first boot, creating an administrator account so the helpdesk is live the moment it finishes deploying. Railway manages the HTTPS domain, private networking between services and horizontal/vertical scaling, so you focus on the helpdesk instead of server configuration.

Common Use Cases

Customer support and helpdesk for small-to-medium businesses
Internal IT ticketing and request tracking for teams
A self-hosted, no-subscription alternative to SaaS support platforms

Dependencies for osTicket Hosting

A MariaDB database service (MySQL-compatible)
A background cron service for scheduled mail and ticket processing

Implementation Details

The web service uses a Dockerfile over hlhd/osticket:v1.18.4 and applies template variables (admin user, password, email, DB credentials) at first boot. The cron image calls osTicket's cron API endpoint every 5 minutes to process inbound email and scheduled tasks.

Why Deploy osTicket 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 osTicket 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.