Deploy and Host RailClaw on Railway 🚅

RailClaw is an open-source AI agent gateway that connects language models to messaging channels like Telegram. It provides a single multiplexed endpoint for WebSocket and HTTP traffic, built-in auth, a control UI, and channel health monitoring out of the box.

About Hosting RailClaw 🦞

Hosting RailClaw requires a persistent process that stays online to maintain connections to messaging channels and handle incoming requests. The gateway needs API keys for your chosen LLM provider (Anthropic, OpenAI), a bot token for each messaging channel, and a secure gateway auth token.

Railway handles the container lifecycle, health checks, and automatic restarts — so the gateway stays available without manual intervention. Configuration is injected via environment variables at deploy time, with no files to manage.

Common Use Cases

👉 Run a personal AI assistant on Telegram with allowlist-based access control 👉 Deploy a customer-facing conversational agent backed by Claude or GPT models 👉 Host a multi-channel gateway that bridges AI models to messaging platforms

Dependencies for RailClaw Hosting

👉 An Anthropic API key to power the agent's conversational model (required) 👉 A gateway auth token — any random string to secure API access (required) 👉 A Telegram bot token (from https://t.me/BotFather) if using the Telegram channel (required) 👉 Telegram user IDs for the DM allowlist (required) 👉 An OpenAI API key for GPT models as a fallback provider (optional) 👉 A Brave API key to enable the web_search tool (optional)

Deployment Dependencies

→ https://docs.openclaw.ai → https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw → https://ghcr.io/openclaw/openclaw → Healthcheck path: /health → Volume mount: /root/.openclaw

Implementation Details

This template deploys with Telegram pre-configured as the default channel. To add new channels, services, or agents after deployment, use the OpenClaw Control UI at:

https://.up.railway.app/

The Control UI is enabled by default and accessible via your Railway-assigned public domain. From there you can manage channels, configure agents, and monitor gateway health — no redeployment required.

This template pulls the latest tag of the official OpenClaw Docker image (ghcr.io/openclaw/openclaw:latest), so every Railway deployment builds against the most current stable release.

The gateway runs as a single containerized service with built-in health checks, automatic restart on failure, and all configuration injected via environment variables — no sidecar services, no manual config files.

A persistent volume at /root/.openclaw preserves config, conversation history, and agent state across redeploys.

Why Deploy RailClaw 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 RailClaw 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.