Deploy and Host Pneumatic on Railway

Pneumatic is an open-source workflow management system that empowers teams to create, run, and optimize business processes collaboratively. It features reusable workflow templates, parallel multi-workflow execution, individual task buckets for staff, and automated stage tracking with real-time handoffs between teams.

About Hosting Pneumatic

Deploying Pneumatic involves running a multi-service architecture composed of a Django/Gunicorn backend (with ASGI via Uvicorn), a Next.js frontend served through PM2, Celery workers and Celery Beat for async task processing and scheduled jobs, and an Nginx reverse proxy tying it all together. The stack requires PostgreSQL for data persistence, Redis for caching, sessions, and WebSocket channels, and RabbitMQ as the Celery message broker. Railway simplifies this by managing each service as a separate component with shared networking and environment variables, eliminating the need to manually configure Docker Compose, SSL, and inter-service communication.

Common Use Cases

Business Process Automation: Design reusable workflow templates for recurring processes like employee onboarding, customer support escalation, or content approval pipelines.
Cross-Team Task Coordination: Assign multi-step workflows that automatically hand off tasks between departments, with real-time tracking of each stage's progress.
SaaS Integration Hub: Connect Pneumatic to external tools via its public REST API or Zapier integration, automating data flow between CRM, HR, and project management systems.

Dependencies for Pneumatic Hosting

PostgreSQL 15 — primary relational database for all application data
Redis 6.2 — used for auth tokens, caching, Django Channels (WebSockets), and session storage
RabbitMQ 3.13 — message broker for Celery async task queue

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

The application runs 6 interconnected services. Key environment variables to configure:

# Core URLs (must match your Railway-provided domain)
SERVER_ADDRESS=your-railway-domain.up.railway.app
BACKEND_URL=https://your-railway-domain.up.railway.app
FRONTEND_URL=https://your-railway-domain.up.railway.app
WSS_URL=wss://your-railway-domain.up.railway.app

# Security (change these from defaults!)
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=
REDIS_PASSWORD=
RABBITMQ_PASSWORD=

# Optional integrations
AI=no                # Enable OpenAI-powered features
EMAIL=no             # Enable email notifications (SMTP or Customer.io)
STORAGE=no           # Enable Google Cloud Storage for file attachments
SSO_AUTH=no           # Enable SSO via Okta or Auth0

The backend starts with gunicorn (Uvicorn workers), runs Django migrations automatically, and initializes periodic Celery Beat tasks on boot. The frontend is a Next.js app managed by PM2 with a default 3 GB memory limit (NODE_OPTIONS=--max-old-space-size=3072). Minimum recommended resources: 8 GB RAM across all services.

Why Deploy Pneumatic 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 Pneumatic 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.