Deploy and Host PostgreSQL on Railway

Postgres is a powerful open-source relational database management system that provides a robust and scalable way to store and manage data. It is a popular choice for web applications, data analysis, and various other use cases.

About Hosting PostgreSQL

Hosting PostgreSQL gives you access to a powerful database server capable of handling concurrent connections, managing data persistence, and supporting high availability configurations. PostgreSQL offers flexible database engine configuration, comprehensive user authentication and permission systems, and efficient storage and memory allocation. The database excels at query optimization and advanced indexing strategies. PostgreSQL deployments benefit from scalable CPU, RAM, and storage resources while supporting enterprise-grade network security through SSL encryption and Railway's private network capabilities. Railway provides automated backup systems and comprehensive logging to support your database operations.

Common Use Cases

• Web Application Backend: Storing user data, session information, product catalogs, and transactional data for e-commerce sites, content management systems, and social media platforms.

• Data Analytics and Reporting: Powering business intelligence dashboards, data warehouses, and analytical workloads that require complex queries and aggregations across large datasets.

• API and Microservices Data Layer: Serving as the primary database for REST APIs, GraphQL services, and microservices architectures that need ACID compliance and relational data integrity.

• Real-time Applications: Supporting chat applications, notification systems, and live dashboards that require concurrent read/write operations with strong consistency guarantees.

Dependencies for PostgreSQL Hosting

• openssl - For generating the self-signed SSL certificate

Deployment Dependencies

• The official Postgres image - https://hub.docker.com/_/postgres
• The GitHub repo for the Railway Postgres image - https://github.com/railwayapp-templates/postgres-ssl

Implementation Details

Self-Signed SSL Certificate

This image is a slightly modified version of the official Postgres image.

The official Postgres image in Docker hub does not come with SSL baked in.

Since this could pose a problem for applications or services attempting to connect to Postgres services over the public network, we decided to roll our own Postgres image with SSL enabled right out of the box.

This image has a init-ssl.sh script that is copied into the docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ directory to be executed upon initialization.

This script will generate a self-signed SSL certificate and key and copy them into the /var/lib/postgresql/data/ssl directory.

It will also update the postgresql.conf file to use the SSL certificate and key.

Certificate renewal

The certificate will need to be manually renewed every 820 days.

This can be done by simply redeploying or restarting the service.

Custom Environment Variables Specific to this Postgres SSL Image

• SSL_CERT_DAYS - The number of days the SSL certificate will be valid for.

• LOG_TO_STDOUT - Whether to redirect all logs to stdout, must be set to "true" to enable logging to the console.

Why Deploy PostgreSQL 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 scale it.

By deploying Postgres 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.