Deploy Rootprint

Deploy and Host Rootprint with Railway

Rootprint is an open-source, self-hosted logs and traces platform with full-text search on object-storage-backed indexes. It ingests OpenTelemetry data and gives your team a log explorer, trace waterfalls, a service health dashboard, and team access control, while every byte of telemetry stays inside your own Railway project. Apache-2.0 licensed.

About Hosting Rootprint

This template deploys four services. rootprint is the API and web UI on a public domain. quickwit is the search engine (Quickwit 0.9.0) that indexes and queries your telemetry. Bucket is Railway object storage where Quickwit writes every index and its metastore, so all indexed history lives in durable storage at $0.015 per GB-month with free egress. Postgres holds users, settings, saved views, and audit rows. On first boot rootprint runs its migrations and probes Quickwit before it starts listening. Open the public URL, create the first admin account, create an ingest key under Settings → API keys, and point your OpenTelemetry Collector at /v1/logs and /v1/traces with that key as a bearer token. A custom domain needs no variable changes because ORIGIN follows RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN.

Common Use Cases

• Centralized log search for a Railway project or a fleet of services without paying a hosted SaaS per gigabyte.
• Distributed tracing: open a trace from any log line or paste a trace ID, then read per-span timing, attributes, and events.
• Service health monitoring: request rate, error rate, and p95 latency per service, slow endpoints, outbound dependencies, and failing spans.
• Team-shared observability with invites, roles, scoped ingest keys, service accounts, and Google, GitHub, or OpenID Connect single sign-on.
• Long-retention audit and compliance logs stored cheaply in object storage.

Dependencies for Rootprint Hosting

• Quickwit 0.9.0 (quickwit/quickwit:v0.9.0) as the search engine
• Railway Storage Bucket for index and metastore storage
• Railway PostgreSQL for application data
• Any OTLP-compatible sender: OpenTelemetry Collector, Vector, Fluent Bit, or an OpenTelemetry SDK

Deployment Dependencies

• Rootprint docs: https://docs.rootprint.io
• Quickstart: https://docs.rootprint.io/quickstart
• Send logs: https://docs.rootprint.io/send-logs/overview
• Query syntax: https://docs.rootprint.io/search/query-language
• API reference: https://docs.rootprint.io/api/overview
• Scaling beyond one node: https://docs.rootprint.io/install/scaling
• Source: https://github.com/rootprint/rootprint
• Live demo: https://demo.rootprint.io

Implementation Details

Minimal OpenTelemetry Collector exporter pointing at your deployment:

exporters:
  otlphttp/rootprint:
    endpoint: https://
    headers:
      Authorization: Bearer 

Logs land in the bundled otel-logs-v0_9 index; spans go to POST /v1/traces with the same key.

Variables preset by this template:

• rootprint: DATABASE_URL=${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}, QUICKWIT_URL=http://${{quickwit.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:7280, ORIGIN=https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}, BETTER_AUTH_SECRET=${{secret(64)}}, TRUST_PROXY_HOPS=1
• quickwit: QW_DEFAULT_INDEX_ROOT_URI=s3://${{Bucket.BUCKET}}/indexes, QW_METASTORE_URI=s3://${{Bucket.BUCKET}}/metastore, QW_S3_ENDPOINT=${{Bucket.ENDPOINT}}, plus AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and AWS_REGION referenced from the bucket

Notes:

• BETTER_AUTH_SECRET is generated once at deploy time. Keep it: it signs sessions and encrypts stored OAuth tokens.
• TRUST_PROXY_HOPS=1 matches Railway's edge proxy, so rate limits key on the real client IP.
• The quickwit volume only holds the ingest queue and indexing scratch. Losing it costs at most in-flight data, never history.
• Railway buckets use virtual-hosted S3 URLs, which is Quickwit's default, so no flavor or path-style override is set.
• This is a single-node Quickwit with a file-backed metastore. To run multiple Quickwit nodes, move the metastore to Postgres as described in the scaling guide.
• Rootprint requires Quickwit 0.9.0. Do not bump the quickwit image on its own.

Why Deploy Rootprint 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 Rootprint 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. Your logs and traces stay in the same project as the services that produce them, the bucket gives you cheap durable retention, and the whole stack comes up from one click with no external accounts to wire together.