Deploy and Host Portainer Server on Railway

Portainer Server is an open-source lightweight management UI that allows you to easily manage your Docker containers, images, networks, and volumes. It provides a simple and intuitive interface for both beginners and experienced users to interact with their Docker environments.

About Hosting Portainer Server

Hosting Portainer Server involves deploying the application on a cloud platform, configuring the necessary resources, and ensuring that it can communicate with your Docker environment. This typically includes setting up a container for Portainer, configuring storage for persistent data, and managing access controls for users, and opening the Portainer Tunnel for any Edge Agents you plan to configure.

Common Use Cases

• Managing Docker containers and images
• Monitoring container performance and resource usage
• Managing Kubernetes clusters

Dependencies for Portainer Server Hosting

• Portainer Server

Deployment Dependencies

To configure Portainer to connect to an Edge Agent, there are some manual steps you must do: First, create the Edge Agent configuration in the Portainer UI. This will generate a join token for you, and a command to deploy the agent on your server. Next, you will need to decode the join token. Copy it and paste it into your base64 decoder of choice (we used https://www.base64decode.org/). Decode the token, and look for the second phrase in between the bar characters (|): https://portainer-server.up.railway.app|**portainer-server.up.railway.app:8000**|whatever|whatever

Replace the part highlighted with bold with the URL for the Portainer Tunnel in this format: https://portainer-tunnel.up.railway.app Make sure you add https:// in the beginning, and drop the :8000 at the end.

Finally, re-encode the join token to base64 and copy it and replace the original join token in the command you were given to deploy the Edge Agent. Keep in mind to NOT COPY ANY EQUAL SIGNS (=) AT THE END OF THE BASE64 OUTPUT, or you will get errors. This is because Portainer uses raw base64 encoding, which doesn't include padding (the equal signs).

Why Deploy Portainer Server 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 Portainer Server 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.