Deploy and Host ParadeDB on Railway

You want better search, not the burden of Elasticsearch. ParadeDB is the modern Elastic alternative built as a Postgres extension.

For support, join the ParadeDB Community Slack: https://paradedb.com/slack

What is ParadeDB

ParadeDB is an Elasticsearch alternative that provides BM25 full-text search, fuzzy matching, faceted search, and hybrid search (combining keyword and semantic search) directly in Postgres. It's built on pg_search, a Postgres extension powered by Tantivy — a Rust-based search engine inspired by Apache Lucene. ParadeDB is SQL-native, ACID-compliant, and requires no ETL pipelines or external sync tools.

About Hosting ParadeDB

ParadeDB runs as a Postgres extension inside a standard PostgreSQL instance. The ParadeDB Docker image ships with pg_search pre-installed on PostgreSQL 18. There is no separate search service to manage — search indexes live in Postgres and are updated transactionally with your data. Deploying on Railway provisions a Docker container with persistent storage and a TCP proxy, giving you a fully functional ParadeDB instance accessible over both private and public connection strings.

For more information on deploying and hosting ParadeDB, see the ParadeDB deployment documentation.

Deployment Modes

ParadeDB on Railway uses ParadeDB Community and runs as a single-node deployment. There are two ways to use it:

• All-in-One Database: Use ParadeDB as your primary Postgres database for both transactions and search indexes. Your application reads and writes directly to ParadeDB, and search indexes stay in sync automatically within the same transaction.

• Search Replica via Logical Replication: Use ParadeDB as a logical replica of an existing Postgres, such as AWS RDS, Google CloudSQL, or Azure Database. ParadeDB subscribes to changes from your primary and indexes them for search, isolating search workloads from your production database.

Common Use Cases

• Full-Text and Hybrid Search: Replace Elasticsearch for product search, content discovery, or documentation search. ParadeDB provides BM25 relevance scoring, fuzzy matching, phrase search, and faceted search — all queryable with SQL. Combine with pgvector for hybrid keyword + semantic search in a single query.

• Search Over Transactional Data: Index frequently updated tables without ETL pipelines. ParadeDB indexes update within the same Postgres transaction as your writes, so search results are always consistent with your data — no sync lag, no stale results.

• User-Facing Analytics: Power dashboards, list views, and explorer interfaces that need fast sorting, filtering, and aggregations over large datasets. ParadeDB's columnar index accelerates GROUP BY, Top K, and aggregate queries without requiring a separate OLAP system — so your users can slice and filter data in real time from the same Postgres instance that serves your application.

• Consolidating Search Infrastructure: Teams running both Postgres and Elasticsearch can consolidate into a single system. ParadeDB supports JOINs, transactions, and standard Postgres tooling while matching Elasticsearch-grade search quality, eliminating an entire category of operational complexity.

Dependencies for ParadeDB Hosting

None. The ParadeDB Docker image is self-contained with all extensions pre-installed.