Deploy and Host Paperclip on Railway

Paperclip is an open-source orchestration platform for autonomous AI companies. It lets you define a mission, assign AI roles like CEO, CTO, engineers, and marketers, and run operations through goals, tickets, heartbeats, governance controls, and budgets. It is self-hosted, MIT licensed, and built to manage one or many AI-driven organizations from a single control plane.

About Hosting Paperclip

Hosting Paperclip involves running its control plane, persistence layer, and agent integration points in a stable production environment. In this Railway template, a setup wrapper manages onboarding, bootstrap invite flow, and secure proxying to the internal Paperclip service. Deployment is handled with Docker, alongside a connected PostgreSQL database and configuration for auth and public URLs. You can also add API keys for the local model providers you want to use, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini. The setup supports multi-company operation, governance workflows, and persistent state, with health and setup endpoints available to validate readiness and onboarding after deploys or restarts.

Common Use Cases

Run a self-hosted autonomous AI company with structured roles, approvals, and budget limits.
Operate multiple isolated AI companies from one deployment for portfolio companies or internal teams.
Build an agent governance layer for product, engineering, and operations workflows with full auditability.

Dependencies for Paperclip Hosting

PostgreSQL database
LLM/API credentials for the local adapters you enable, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini

Deployment Dependencies

Paperclip: https://paperclip.ing
Paperclip Railway template: https://github.com/lovexbytes/paperclip-railway-template

Implementation Details

This template includes a full no-code setup flow:

Open /setup
Paste SETUP_TOKEN from Railway environment variables
Generate the bootstrap invite URL from the setup page
Open the invite link and follow Paperclip’s onboarding flow to create your account
Log in and continue in the Paperclip app

Template endpoints:

GET /wrapper/healthz
GET /setup/healthz
GET /setup/api/status
POST /setup/api/bootstrap

Recommended core environment variables:

DATABASE_URL
PAPERCLIP_PUBLIC_URL
BETTER_AUTH_URL
BETTER_AUTH_SECRET
PAPERCLIP_AGENT_JWT_SECRET

Custom domain note:

If you replace the Railway-generated domain with your own custom domain, you must update PAPERCLIP_PUBLIC_URL to the full public URL of that custom domain (including https://).
Example: PAPERCLIP_PUBLIC_URL=https://your-paperclip-domain.com

Provider keys (only for adapters you enable):

OPENAI_API_KEY
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
GEMINI_API_KEY (or GOOGLE_API_KEY)

Why Deploy Paperclip 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 Paperclip 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.