Deploy and Host Redpanda on Railway

Redpanda is a Kafka-compatible streaming platform written in C++. Existing Kafka clients, connectors and tools work unchanged, but there is no JVM or ZooKeeper to manage. A single binary also includes a Schema Registry and an HTTP proxy, which makes it a good small-footprint Kafka alternative.

About Hosting Redpanda

This template runs the official redpandadata/redpanda:v26.2.3 image as a single-node broker plus Kafbat UI, a free web console for Kafka clusters. Redpanda Console's own login needs an enterprise licence, so Kafbat UI provides the login form instead. The Kafka API, Schema Registry and HTTP proxy listen on Railway's private network over IPv4 and IPv6 and advertise the private hostname, so clients in the same project connect without extra setup. Data lives on a Railway volume and survives redeploys. The broker is capped at one core and 1 GB of memory; raise REDPANDA_MEMORY for heavier use. It is a single node, so there is no replication.

Common Use Cases

Event streaming between services in a Railway project
Running Kafka-based code without operating a JVM cluster
Change-data-capture and log pipelines with Kafka connectors

Dependencies for Redpanda Hosting

redpandadata/redpanda:v26.2.3 (official image)
ghcr.io/kafbat/kafka-ui:v1.5.0 (Kafbat UI)
A Railway volume at /var/lib/redpanda/data

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Service	Source	Networking	Storage
redpanda	`redpandadata/redpanda:v26.2.3`	private: Kafka 9092, Schema Registry 8081, HTTP proxy 8082	volume at `/var/lib/redpanda/data`
kafbat	`ghcr.io/kafbat/kafka-ui:v1.5.0`	public domain on 8080	none

Variable	Default	Purpose
`REDPANDA_MEMORY`	`1G`	Memory given to the broker
`SPRING_SECURITY_USER_NAME`	`admin`	Kafbat UI login
`SPRING_SECURITY_USER_PASSWORD`	generated	Its password
`KAFKA_CLUSTERS_0_BOOTSTRAPSERVERS`	`${{redpanda.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:9092`	Broker address for the UI

Notes:

Clients use redpanda.railway.internal:9092 as the bootstrap server.
Kafka clients outside Railway need an extra advertised listener behind a TCP proxy; this template keeps the broker private.
Redpanda runs in dev-container mode, the single-node profile. Redpanda Community is licensed under the BSL 1.1.

This is a community-maintained deployment package and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by Redpanda Data or the Kafbat project.

Why Deploy Redpanda 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 Redpanda 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.