---
title: "Deploy Plausible CE | (Just Updated) Google Analytics Alternative Nobody Else Can Claim"
description: "Privacy-first analytics. Owner account seeded before the URL goes live."
category: "Analytics"
url: https://railway.com/deploy/plausible-ce-or-just-updated-google-anal
---

# Deploy Plausible CE | (Just Updated) Google Analytics Alternative Nobody Else Can Claim

Privacy-first analytics. Owner account seeded before the URL goes live.

**[Deploy Plausible CE | (Just Updated) Google Analytics Alternative Nobody Else Can Claim on Railway](https://railway.com/template/plausible-ce-or-just-updated-google-anal)**

- **Creator:** SuperSlowSloth
- **Category:** Analytics

## Template content

### postgres

- **Image:** postgres:17.10-alpine

### plausible

- **Image:** ghcr.io/bon5co/plausible-railway:v3.2.1
- **Health check:** /api/health
- **Public domain:** Yes

### clickhouse

- **Image:** clickhouse/clickhouse-server:24.12-alpine

## Documentation

# Deploy and Host Plausible Community Edition on Railway

Plausible Community Edition is a lightweight, privacy-first web analytics
platform and a self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics: no cookies, no
personal data collection, a single script tag, and a dashboard your team can
read without training. This template deploys Plausible CE v3.2.1 together with
its PostgreSQL and ClickHouse databases, and — unlike a stock deploy — it seeds
your owner account before the public URL ever serves a request.

## About Hosting Plausible Community Edition

Plausible CE is an Elixir/Phoenix application backed by two databases:
PostgreSQL for accounts, sites and settings, and ClickHouse for the event
stream that powers the dashboards. Hosting it means running all three, wiring
the connection strings, keeping a durable disk under each datastore, and
running the schema migrations on every upgrade.

It also means dealing with first launch. A stock Plausible image starts with an
empty user table, and while that is true Plausible deliberately opens
registration to whoever arrives first — the guard that would normally close
sign-ups is bypassed during first launch, so `DISABLE_REGISTRATION` does not
help. On a public URL that means the first stranger who loads `/register` gets
the owner account, and the deployer is locked out for good, because Plausible's
password recovery is an emailed link and a fresh deployment has no mail server.

This template removes that window. Migrations run, the owner account and its
team are created, and only then is the HTTP port opened, so the very first
request the public URL serves already redirects `/register` to `/login`. The
owner password is re-applied on every boot, which makes a redeploy a working
password reset — the recovery path a self-hosted analytics instance otherwise
does not have. Both databases carry volumes, every image is pinned, and the
deploy form asks for nothing.

## Why Deploy Plausible Community Edition on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform for deploying your apps and databases. Railway
gives this stack private networking between the app and both datastores,
persistent volumes for PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, a managed TLS domain, and
one-click redeploys — which here double as password resets. You own the data and
the instance, and there is no per-pageview pricing.

## Common Use Cases

- Replace Google Analytics on a marketing site or blog with a cookieless,
  GDPR-friendly script that needs no consent banner.
- Give a client or a whole team a shared, readable traffic dashboard without
  handing out access to a third-party ad platform.
- Track a SaaS product's funnels, goals and custom events on infrastructure you
  control, with the raw event data in your own ClickHouse.

## Dependencies for Plausible Community Edition Hosting

- PostgreSQL 17 — accounts, sites, goals and settings.
- ClickHouse 24.12 — the analytics event store.

### Deployment Dependencies

- Plausible Community Edition: https://github.com/plausible/community-edition
- Plausible CE documentation: https://github.com/plausible/community-edition#readme
- Railway packaging for this template:
  https://github.com/bon5co/plausible-railway

### Implementation Details

The owner account is created from `PLAUSIBLE_ADMIN_EMAIL` and
`PLAUSIBLE_ADMIN_PASSWORD`, both generated for you at deploy time. The container
refuses to boot if either is empty, so an unclaimed instance is never published.
Read the generated password from the service's variables, sign in at `/login`,
then add your first site and copy the tracking snippet.


## Similar templates

- [Betterlytics](https://railway.com/deploy/betterlytics) — Betterlytics is a cookieless analytics platform GDPR-compliant.
- [Finance Tracker](https://railway.com/deploy/finance-tracker-1) — Private multi-user household finance ledger with budgets and CSV import.
- [Matomo Analytics + MariaDB](https://railway.com/deploy/matomo-analytics-mariadb) — Privacy-friendly analytics with MariaDB and persistent volumes.

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