Deploy and Host Paperless-ngx on Railway

About Hosting Paperless-ngx on Railway

Paperless-ngx runs well on Railway as a Docker-based web service backed by managed Postgres and Redis, giving you quick browser access to document ingestion, OCR, and search.

Tech Stack

• Paperless-ngx (Django + Celery)
• PostgreSQL 18
• Redis 8
• Docker image deployment on Railway

Why Deploy Paperless-ngx on Railway

Railway provides fast Docker deploys, built-in private networking between services, and simple environment variable wiring for multi-service apps like Paperless-ngx.

Common Use Cases

• Personal paperless office and scanned invoice archive
• Team document indexing and full-text retrieval
• Email/consume-folder based document intake workflows

Deployment Notes

• Web service uses pinned upstream image docker.io/paperlessngx/paperless-ngx:2.20.15 and listens on container port 8000.
• Set PORT=8000 for Railway HTTP routing.
• Required app variables include database/redis wiring plus PAPERLESS_SECRET_KEY.
• Admin bootstrap is enabled via PAPERLESS_ADMIN_USER and PAPERLESS_ADMIN_PASSWORD.
• Postgres and Redis are private internal services; only the web service is public.
• App media persistence is not mounted by default in this template; add a volume based on your retention requirements.

Dependencies for Paperless-ngx on Railway

Paperless-ngx depends on PostgreSQL for metadata persistence and Redis for task queue/broker functionality.

Deployment Dependencies