Deploy and Host Plausible CE on Railway

Plausible Community Edition is a privacy-friendly, open-source web analytics platform. It's a lightweight, cookie-free alternative to Google Analytics, designed for self-hosting. Built on Elixir/Phoenix with ClickHouse for event storage, it serves real-time dashboards while remaining GDPR/CCPA/PECR compliant out of the box.

About Hosting Plausible CE

This template deploys Plausible CE on Railway as a 3-sibling-service architecture: the Plausible CE app itself, ClickHouse for high-performance event storage, and PostgreSQL for application metadata. Both data services use Railway volumes for persistence. Internal networking is wired automatically (postgres.railway.internal, clickhouse.railway.internal). The template ships with literal credential defaults so a one-click deploy boots into a working state — no manual env-var hunting. First deploy takes ~60-90 seconds (Postgres initdb + Plausible CE DB migrations + Elixir release boot).

Common Use Cases

Privacy-focused web analytics for personal sites, blogs, and SaaS products
GDPR/CCPA-compliant analytics for EU businesses avoiding cookie banners
Cookie-free analytics for sites serving privacy-conscious audiences

Dependencies for Plausible CE Hosting

Plausible CE (ghcr.io/plausible/community-edition:v3.2.1)
ClickHouse (clickhouse/clickhouse-server:24.12-alpine) — analytics event store
PostgreSQL 16 (upstream) — application metadata + user accounts

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

The template uses a parent-mount geometry for the PostgreSQL volume: volume mounts at /var/lib/postgresql (parent path) with PGDATA=/var/lib/postgresql/data (subpath). This sidesteps the ext4 lost+found/ initdb crash that occurs when the volume mounts directly at the PGDATA path. Default credentials are literal (postgres/postgres, plausible/plausible2026) — rotate in BOTH the credential tile AND the Plausible CE's DATABASE_URL / CLICKHOUSE_DATABASE_URL to keep them in sync.

Why Deploy Plausible CE 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 Plausible CE 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.