Deploy ParadeDB

Deploy and Host ParadeDB on Railway

ParadeDB is a PostgreSQL distribution that puts a real search engine inside the database. It ships pg_search, an index built on the Rust Tantivy library, giving Postgres BM25 relevance scoring, phrase and fuzzy matching, snippet highlighting and faceted aggregations — what teams normally add an Elasticsearch cluster for. The index is maintained by Postgres transactions: no ETL job, no lag between a write and its appearance in results, no second system to secure and upgrade. It also bundles pgvector, pg_ivm, PostGIS and pg_cron, so hybrid keyword-and-vector retrieval is one SQL query.

Deploy ParadeDB on Railway and you get PostgreSQL 18 with those extensions preloaded, a persistent volume, TLS on the wire, and a public TCP endpoint for psql, an ORM or a migration job. Backups come wired: every WAL segment is archived to a Railway object storage bucket as it closes and a base backup is taken daily, through the Barman Cloud tooling ParadeDB ships in its image. Self-host ParadeDB without that plumbing and you configure archive_command, memory and certificates by hand.

Getting Started with ParadeDB on Railway

ParadeDB has no web interface — it is a database, reached over the PostgreSQL wire protocol. When the deploy finishes, open the service's Variables tab and copy DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL, which connects through the public TCP proxy as a least-privilege role; services in the same project use the private DATABASE_URL. Run psql "$DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL" then SELECT extname, extversion FROM pg_extension; — pg_search, vector, pg_ivm, postgis and pg_stat_statements are already there. Railway's Data tab also browses tables with no local client.

Then index a table and query it with the match operators — ||| is "any of these terms", &&& is "all of them", and pdb.score(id) exposes the BM25 score.

CREATE TABLE articles (id bigserial PRIMARY KEY, title text, body text, rating int);

CREATE INDEX articles_search ON articles
USING paradedb (id, title, body, rating) WITH (key_field='id');

SELECT title, pdb.score(id) AS score
FROM articles
WHERE body ||| 'postgres replication' AND rating > 2
ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT 10;

Two roles exist. postgres is the superuser, for extensions, pg_cron jobs and administration. app owns the public schema and is what DATABASE_URL points at: it can create tables, migrate and install trusted extensions, but cannot create roles or databases or read password hashes.

About Hosting ParadeDB

Postgres has had full-text search for years, but tsvector ranking is not BM25: no term-frequency saturation, no document-length normalization, poor behaviour on large corpora. That gap is why so many applications run Postgres and Elasticsearch.

• BM25 relevance with tokenizers, stemming, token filters and snippet highlighting
• Hybrid search — BM25 rankings fused with pgvector similarity in one query
• Filtered search — a match predicate beside ordinary WHERE, JOIN and GROUP BY
• Aggregations and facets over columnar storage, for counts by category or date bucket
• PostGIS and pg_cron included, so geospatial filters and scheduled reindexing need nothing extra

The deployment is one service: the container holds the cluster on a volume at /var/lib/postgresql, exposes 5432 through a TCP proxy, and serves an internal health endpoint that runs a real query rather than checking the process exists. A bucket holds the WAL archive and base backups.

Why Deploy ParadeDB on Railway

Railway removes the operational work of a self-managed search database.

• One-click deploy with the cluster on a persistent volume
• Continuous WAL archiving and daily base backups to a bucket
• Memory and parallelism sized from the container's real limits
• TLS and a public TCP endpoint provisioned for you
• Private networking for services in the same project
• Vertical scaling without a migration

Common Use Cases

• Replacing an Elasticsearch sidecar in an app already running Postgres, removing the sync job
• Retrieval for AI applications — BM25 and vector similarity fused in one query
• In-app search for docs sites, catalogues and knowledge bases needing ranking and facets
• Log and event exploration, with columnar aggregates counting over the table being searched

Dependencies for ParadeDB

• ParadeDB — paradedb/paradedb:latest-pg18, built from github.com/gridalpha/paradedb-railway: PostgreSQL 18 with pg_search, pgvector, pg_ivm, PostGIS, pg_cron and pg_stat_statements preloaded.
• Object storage bucket — the WAL archive and base backups written by Barman Cloud.

Environment Variables Reference

Deployment Dependencies

• Image: hub.docker.com/r/paradedb/paradedb · Project: github.com/paradedb/paradedb · Docs: paradedb.com/docs

Hardware Requirements for Self-Hosting ParadeDB

Memory and parallelism are derived from the container's real limits on every start, so resizing retunes the database.

Self-Hosting ParadeDB Outside Railway

The published image is a drop-in Postgres. Under Docker, with a named volume:

docker run -d --name paradedb \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=postgres -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=changeme -e POSTGRES_DB=paradedb \
  -p 5432:5432 -v paradedb_data:/var/lib/postgresql \
  paradedb/paradedb:latest-pg18

Existing data moves across with the standard Postgres tools:

pg_dump -Fc --no-acl --no-owner -h old-host -U olduser olddb > old_db.dump
pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U postgres -d paradedb -Fc old_db.dump

Give the container more than Docker's default 64 MB of shared memory (--shm-size=1g) or set dynamic_shared_memory_type=mmap, or parallel queries fail once they outgrow /dev/shm.

Is ParadeDB Free?

ParadeDB Community is open source under AGPL-3.0 and is what this template runs — every feature above is free. ParadeDB Enterprise is a paid product adding high availability and read replicas, deployed through Kubernetes or bring-your-own-cloud. On Railway you pay only for the compute, volume and storage used.

ParadeDB vs Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch still wins on corpora spread over many nodes. Below that, keeping search in the database removes a moving part from the stack.

FAQ

What is ParadeDB? A PostgreSQL distribution with pg_search, a Rust-based index adding BM25 full-text search, facets and hybrid vector search to Postgres.

What does this Railway template deploy? One ParadeDB service running PostgreSQL 18 on a persistent volume, exposed over a TCP proxy with TLS, plus a bucket holding WAL archives and daily base backups.

Why does the template include an object storage bucket? Point-in-time recovery needs a base backup and the WAL written since. The bucket holds both, so the database restores to any moment in the retention window.

How do I connect my application to self-hosted ParadeDB? Use ${{ParadeDB.DATABASE_URL}} from another service in the same project: it resolves to the private address and authenticates as the app role, which owns public and can run migrations.

Do I have to rewrite my queries to use ParadeDB? No — it is ordinary Postgres, so existing queries, migrations and ORMs keep working. Search is opt-in: index the columns you want searchable and add the match operators. Official adapters exist for Django, SQLAlchemy, Drizzle, Rails and EF Core.

Can I run ParadeDB with read replicas or automatic failover? Not in the open-source build: replication and high availability are ParadeDB Enterprise features. This is a single node whose durability story is the volume plus the bucket.