Deploy and Host Penpot on Railway

Penpot is the open-source design and prototyping platform, the self-hostable alternative to Figma: vector design, components and variants, design tokens, flex and grid layout, interactive prototypes and real-time multiplayer editing, with an inspect mode that hands developers CSS, SVG and HTML. Files use open standards (SVG, CSS) and you can import your Figma work. This template runs the official Penpot images, pinned, with Postgres, Valkey and a Railway bucket for every uploaded image, font and thumbnail.

About Hosting Penpot

The stack is five services and a bucket: Penpot (the web app), Backend, Exporter, Postgres, Valkey, and the Assets bucket.

Upstream's own images, pinned. penpotapp/frontend, penpotapp/backend and penpotapp/exporter at a fixed release (2.18.3), not the moving latest tag. Upgrading is bumping the three tags together.
Assets in a Railway bucket. Upstream's compose file shares one disk between the web server and the backend; Railway services cannot share a volume, so uploads go to S3 instead. The backend stores objects in the bucket and answers each request with a short-lived signed URL, which the Penpot web server fetches and streams back. Browsers only ever talk to your Penpot domain.
Migrations on every boot. The backend migrates the database at start-up and Railway's health check on /readyz only passes once it is connected to Postgres and Valkey.
Survives redeploys of any service. The web server proxies /api, /assets and websockets to the backend and exports to the exporter over the private network, re-resolving their addresses while it runs, so redeploying the backend never leaves the web app pointing at a dead address, and the web app can start before the others.
Exports work out of the box. The Exporter runs a headless browser that renders PNG, JPEG, SVG and PDF exports from the web app over the private network.
Generated secrets. PENPOT_SECRET_KEY (sessions, invitations, the exporter's key), the database password and the Valkey password are generated for each deployment. Upstream's compose file ships a publicly known change-this-insecure-key.

Common Use Cases

A self-hosted Figma replacement for a product or agency design team
Design systems with shared libraries, components and design tokens
Clickable prototypes to share with clients and stakeholders by link
Design-to-code handoff: developers inspect CSS, SVG and measurements in the browser

Dependencies for Penpot Hosting

Postgres 17 (included, private network only)
Valkey 8, Redis-compatible (included, private network only, used for real-time notifications)
A Railway Storage Bucket (included) for uploaded media, fonts and thumbnails

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Sign up, then close registration. Open the Penpot service's Railway domain and create your account; email verification is off (disable-email-verification) because Railway only allows outbound SMTP on the Pro plan. Registration is open to anyone who finds the URL, so once your team has signed up add disable-registration to PENPOT_FLAGS on the Backend service (the web app and exporter read the same value) and redeploy all three. Teammates can still join through invitations. Penpot has no instance-wide admin: every user owns their own teams and projects.

One place to configure. PENPOT_FLAGS and PENPOT_PUBLIC_URI live on the Backend service; the Penpot and Exporter services reference them. See the list of flags for login with Google, GitHub, GitLab, OIDC or LDAP.

Custom domain. Add it to the Penpot service, then set PENPOT_PUBLIC_URI on Backend to https://your-domain.

Email (optional). For invitations by email, password resets and verification, add PENPOT_SMTP_HOST, PENPOT_SMTP_PORT, PENPOT_SMTP_USERNAME, PENPOT_SMTP_PASSWORD, PENPOT_SMTP_TLS (or PENPOT_SMTP_SSL) and PENPOT_SMTP_DEFAULT_FROM to Backend, and add enable-smtp to PENPOT_FLAGS. Without SMTP you can still invite people to a team and share the invitation link.

Back up. Postgres holds every design file; the bucket holds images, fonts and thumbnails. Losing PENPOT_SECRET_KEY only logs everyone out.

Not included. Upstream's optional admin console and MCP server (AI-assistant integration) are not part of this template, keeping it lean.

Resources. Measured idle on Railway after signing up, uploading an image and running an export: backend (a JVM, heap capped at 1 GB by JAVA_OPTS on Backend) about 1.05 GB, exporter 140 MB (up to ~400 MB while its headless browser is warm after an export), Postgres about 230 MB, the web server about 65 MB and Valkey 15 MB: roughly 1.5 GB for the stack, up to ~1.8 GB while exporting. That needs the Hobby plan; it does not fit the Trial plan's 512 MB per service.

Why Deploy Penpot 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 Penpot 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.