Deploy Pulsar

Apache Pulsar

Distributed streaming platform (Kafka/AMQP alternative) with persistent storage, on Railway

Deploy and Host

Apache Pulsar (distributed streaming and messaging platform) on Railway. Single click spins up a single-node standalone broker — broker, BookKeeper, and ZooKeeper metadata in one process — with BookKeeper ledgers and metadata persisted to a Railway volume, so topics and messages survive restarts and deploys.

About Hosting

Apache Pulsar is a distributed pub-sub streaming platform designed to decouple messaging from compute, storage, and networking. A single standalone node bundles the broker (messaging), BookKeeper (distributed log storage), and ZooKeeper/managed metadata in one process. This template deploys one broker with its data plane on a persistent volume.

Included web dashboard: a pulsar-gui service (pulsar-express) is deployed alongside the broker and pre-wired to its admin API over the private network — open the pulsar-gui service's Railway domain after deploy to browse clusters, tenants, namespaces, topics, subscriptions, and message stats.

Why Deploy

Self-hosting on Railway gives you full control over your message data. Run event-driven architectures, real-time pipelines, or CDC-style ingestion without managing a cluster. The broker runs a single-node standalone, and the volume keeps BookKeeper ledgers and metadata durable across restarts and deploys.

Common Use Cases

• Event-driven microservices with async message passing
• Real-time analytics pipelines and data ingestion
• Change data capture (CDC) from databases to downstream consumers
• CQRS/Event Sourcing systems with append-only streams
• IoT telemetry and time-series ingestion
• Kafka/AMQP workloads needing a managed, low-ops broker in your own infra

Dependencies for Apache Pulsar

Deployment Dependencies

Apache Pulsar (standalone) is a single self-contained service: broker + BookKeeper + ZooKeeper metadata all run in one process. No companion database is required. BookKeeper ledgers and metadata are written to the attached Railway volume at /pulsar/data and survive restarts and deploys.

Storage

> Without this volume, every restart re-initializes the broker's log and metadata — all topics and messages are lost. The mount at /pulsar/data is what makes the broker durable.

Features

• Single-node standalone — broker + BookKeeper + ZooKeeper metadata in one process; no external cluster to manage.
• Durable by default — BookKeeper ledgers and metadata on a Railway persistent volume; topics and messages survive restarts and deploys.
• Wire protocols — native pulsar:// (and pulsar+ws:// WebSocket) messaging, plus the web/admin HTTP API on :8080.
• Auto-topic creation enabled out of the box — produce to any topic name immediately.
• Public + private reach — the broker advertises the public domain by default for external consumers, and same-project services can reach it over the private network.
• Health-gated — the service is only "healthy" once /admin/v2/clusters answers 200, i.e. the full broker+storage stack is ready.

Quick Start

1. Deploy using the button above. Railway creates the broker service and starts the standalone stack.

2. Attach a Railway volume at /pulsar/data (see Prerequisites) so topics/messages are durable.

3. Connect a client. The broker listens on pulsar://:6650 (binary) / pulsar+ws://:9091 (websocket) / http://:8080 (admin):

   # produce
   bin/pulsar-client --url pulsar://:6650 \
     produce persistent://public/default/my-topic -m "hello pulsar"
   
   # consume
   bin/pulsar-client --url pulsar://:6650 \
     consume persistent://public/default/my-topic --subscription my-sub
   
   # admin (list clusters / topics)
   curl http://:8080/admin/v2/clusters
   curl http://:8080/admin/v2/namespaces/public/default/topics
   

4. Enable public TCP for data ports (6650/9091) if you want the native messaging endpoint exposed beyond the private network (the admin API on 8080 is already public).

   No TCP proxy needed for WebSocket clients: the embedded WebSocket service also listens on 8080, so wss:///ws/v2/... works out of the box:

   # produce (any websocket client; payload is base64 JSON)
   wss:///ws/v2/producer/persistent/public/default/my-topic
   # consume from earliest
   wss:///ws/v2/reader/persistent/public/default/my-topic/messages?messageId=earliest
   

   Note: the producer endpoint may not emit its initial connected frame — send your first message immediately after connecting and read the send receipt back.

Environment

Prerequisites

• Recommended: Railway volume at /pulsar/data. Without a volume the broker runs, but all data is wiped on every restart.
• Data ports for external messaging are reachable on the private network by default. To expose pulsar:// to the internet, enable public TCP for 6650 (and optionally 9091) in the service's Networking settings; the admin API on 8080 is already public.

Architecture

                     ┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
 external clients    │            Railway service (1 node)         │
 ─── pulsar:// ──────│  broker (messaging)  :6650  :9091          │
   :6650 / :9091 ────│  web/admin  HTTP     :8080  /admin/v2/...   │
   http://:8080 ─────│  in-broker            :2181  ZooKeeper      │
                     │  in-broker            :3181  BookKeeper     │
 same-project ───────│  private network (RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN)   │
 network            └───────────────┬─────────────────────────────┘
                                    │  /pulsar/data (persistent volume)
                                    ▼
                          [Railway persistent storage]

• One process, three roles — broker, BookKeeper, and ZooKeeper/managed metadata all run in a single standalone node (no external cluster).
• Primary port 8080 — web/admin HTTP; used by the RAILPACK build probe (/admin/v2/clusters), the runtime healthcheck, and the public L7 URL.
• Data plane — pulsar://:6650 and pulsar+ws://:9091 carry the messaging traffic; reach them via the private network or, once public TCP is enabled, the public TCP-proxy endpoint.

Configuration Reference

See Also

• Apache Pulsar — docs and client SDKs
• Pulsar quickstart
• Railway persistent volumes
• Railway public TCP proxy