Deploy and Host Sim AI on Railway

Deploy Sim AI v0.9.26, an open-source visual platform for building, running, and scheduling AI-agent workflows.

About Hosting Sim AI

This template deploys five coordinated services: the Sim web application and API, its realtime Socket.IO service, PostgreSQL 17 with pgvector, a one-shot database migration job, and the Sim cron scheduler. The application and realtime service each receive a Railway HTTPS domain; PostgreSQL, migrations, and cron remain private.

Open the simstudio domain to register the first account. Configure model-provider and integration credentials in Sim as needed. Database, authentication, encryption, internal API, and cron secrets are generated per deployment and wired through Railway references.

Common Use Cases

Build low-code AI-agent and automation workflows.
Connect LLMs, SaaS tools, webhooks, knowledge bases, and custom functions.
Run scheduled workflows and polling triggers through the included cron service.
Store workflow state, credentials, documents, and embeddings in PostgreSQL with pgvector.
Use realtime collaboration and execution updates through the dedicated Socket.IO service.

Dependencies for Sim AI Hosting

Sim AI v0.9.26 app, realtime, migrations, and cron images, pinned to matching immutable OCI indexes.
PostgreSQL 17 with pgvector and a persistent volume.
Generated Better Auth, encryption, internal API, API encryption, database, and cron secrets.
Optional external model-provider and integration credentials for the workflows you enable.

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

The simstudio, realtime, and migrations images share one database schema and must be upgraded together. The cron image runs the upstream schedule from docker/crontab and authenticates its private HTTP calls with the generated CRON_SECRET; it calls the app at simstudio.railway.internal:8080 and needs no public domain.

The migration service runs bun run db:migrate once and exits successfully. The app uses the public Railway origin for Better Auth, while realtime uses shared auth and internal API secrets. PostgreSQL data persists at /var/lib/postgresql/data.

Upgrading an existing deployment to v0.9.26

Back up the pgvector volume first. This release adds 26 schema migrations and five one-time data migrations; three of them stop with "operator repair required" when project or file-ownership data is inconsistent, and the only way back is the backup. Deploy migrations and let it exit successfully before simstudio and realtime take traffic.

Why Deploy Sim AI on Railway?

Railway provides managed HTTPS, generated secrets, private service networking, persistent PostgreSQL storage, health checks, and coordinated deployment for Sim AI's complete self-hosted runtime.