Deploy and Host Selenium + FastAPI on Railway

Selenium + FastAPI is a compact starter setup for running browser-driven scraping inside a container. It bundles headless Chromium, a tuned ChromeDriver configuration, and a clean API layer so scraping tasks can be triggered easily through HTTP.

About Hosting Selenium + FastAPI

Hosting Selenium + FastAPI on Railway ensures that all components needed for headless browser tasks run smoothly inside a managed container. Railway handles build steps, networking, environment variables, and scaling, while your service focuses on fetching pages, running browser actions, and parsing data through FastAPI endpoints. The system avoids manual browser setup and remains light enough for small plans. You can extend it with schedulers, queues, or new endpoints without touching the core setup.

How to Use

After deploying this template, the app is already running on Railway. You can open the generated Railway domain to test the starter app immediately.

If you want to customize the source code, use one of the workflows below.

Via Railway CLI

Use this workflow if you want to edit the project locally and redeploy changes directly from your machine using Railway CLI.

1. Deploy the template.
2. Clone the repository from Source Repo or Upstream Repo in the Railway dashboard.
3. Enter the project directory:

cd 

4. Link your local project directory to the deployed Railway project:

railway link

5. Check the linked project, environment, service, and repository information:

railway status

6. Edit the code locally.
7. Redeploy your local changes to Railway:

railway up

Railway will upload the current local directory and deploy it to the linked service.

Via Git / GitHub

Use this workflow if you want to manage changes through GitHub and let Railway automatically redeploy after every push.

1. Deploy the template.
2. Open Source Repo or Upstream Repo from the Railway dashboard.
3. Fork the repository to your own GitHub account.
4. Clone your fork locally:

git clone 
cd 

5. Edit the code locally.
6. Commit and push your changes to your fork:

git add .
git commit -m "Customize Node.js starter"
git push origin main

7. In Railway, change the service Source Repo to your fork if Railway does not automatically create or link it.
8. After the service is connected to your fork, future pushes to the repository can trigger automatic redeployments.

Common Use Cases

• Scraping websites that require JavaScript execution
• Automating browser workflows exposed via an API
• Collecting data for monitoring or analytics

Dependencies for Selenium + FastAPI Hosting

• Chromium and ChromeDriver
• Python runtime with FastAPI and Selenium

Deployment Dependencies

• Railway account: https://railway.com
• FastAPI documentation: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com
• Selenium documentation: https://www.selenium.dev

Why Deploy Selenium + FastAPI 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 Selenium + FastAPI 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.