How do I deploy PinchTab - Railway Template on Railway?

You can deploy PinchTab - Railway Template on Railway by clicking the "Deploy Now" button on this page. Railway will automatically set up all the necessary services and configurations for you.

What are the system requirements?

Railway handles all the infrastructure requirements. You only need a web browser to deploy and manage your application.

Is this template free to use?

Yes, this template is free to use within your existing Railway account.

Can I customize this template?

Yes, you can fully customize this template. After deployment, you will have full control of what you've deployed in your Railway project.

How do I get support for this template?

You can get support through our community forum: pinch-tab-railway-template-efa1cd69, or click "Get template help" for this template for more assistance.

Deploy and Host PinchTab on Railway

PinchTab — Browser control for AI agents

PinchTab is a browser automation bridge that exposes a REST API for controlling Chromium. Built for AI agents, it ships as a 12 MB Go binary with an embedded dashboard — no Selenium, no Puppeteer, no separate browser service. One-click deploy on Railway.

About Hosting PinchTab on Railway

PinchTab runs as a single container that manages multiple isolated Chrome instances, each identified by a profile. It listens on Railway's injected PORT, serves a built-in React dashboard at /dashboard, and exposes its full REST API at /. Authentication is handled via a Bearer token set through the BRIDGE_TOKEN environment variable. A Railway Volume mounted at /data is optional but recommended for persisting browser profiles and state across deploys. The service starts in headless mode by default and is ready to accept requests immediately after the health check passes.

Common Use Cases

AI agent browser backend — give your agent real browser access over a REST API; works with OpenClaw, MCP, LangChain, and any HTTP client
Hosted web scraping — maintain persistent authenticated sessions with ~800 tokens per page extraction versus ~10,000 for screenshot-based approaches
RPA and form automation — navigate, click, type, and extract data from any website at 93% lower token cost than vision-based workflows
Visual regression and E2E testing — run a remote Chrome instance accessible over HTTPS from any CI pipeline or test runner

Dependencies for PinchTab Hosting

Chromium — bundled in the Docker image via the Alpine chromium package; no separate browser service needed
Railway Volume (optional) — mount at /data and set BRIDGE_STATE_DIR=/data to persist profiles across deploys

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

PinchTab Dashboard

Once deployed, open /dashboard in your browser. Go to Settings, enter your BRIDGE_TOKEN value in the Auth Token field, and click Apply Settings. Then go to Profiles to create a browser profile and launch an instance.

To use with OpenClaw, install the plugin and point it at your Railway service URL with your token:

openclaw plugins install @pinchtab/openclaw-plugin
openclaw gateway restart

Set baseUrl to your Railway public domain and token to your BRIDGE_TOKEN in ~/.openclaw/config.json5.

To use via HTTP directly, navigate to a page and extract text:

curl -X POST https://YOUR_RAILWAY_DOMAIN/navigate -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"url":"https://example.com"}'
curl https://YOUR_RAILWAY_DOMAIN/text -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"

The required variable is BRIDGE_TOKEN — generate one with: openssl rand -hex 32

Why Deploy PinchTab 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 PinchTab 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.