Deploy and Host Smooth Operator on Railway

Smooth Operator is a Telegram-based AI operator for daily ops. Ask it questions about incidents, customers, logs, databases, and deploys, and it investigates connected systems for you. Instead of jumping between dashboards and support threads, you get grounded answers in one chat powered by your chosen OpenRouter model.

About Hosting Smooth Operator

Hosting Smooth Operator on Railway gives you an always-on AI operator that runs in your own cloud environment. Deploy the template, add your Telegram bot token, add your OpenRouter API key, choose an OpenRouter model, and start chatting with your bot. Railway keeps the service running and provides persistent storage so sessions and runtime state survive redeploys. You can begin with just Telegram and OpenRouter, then optionally connect Datadog or a Postgres database when you want Smooth Operator to investigate production systems.

Common Use Cases

• Ask “what happened?” during incidents and get a concise investigation summary.
• Debug customer issues from Telegram using connected logs, databases, and operational context.
• Run an AI ops assistant with your preferred OpenRouter model instead of being locked into one provider.

Dependencies for Smooth Operator Hosting

• Telegram bot token from BotFather.
• OpenRouter API key.
• OpenRouter model name, such as anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5, google/gemini-2.5-pro, or another supported model.
• Optional Datadog API/App keys for log and incident investigation.
• Optional Postgres database URL for database inspection.

Deployment Dependencies

• Railway template: https://railway.com/deploy/To01dE
• Create a Telegram bot with BotFather: https://t.me/BotFather
• OpenRouter API keys: https://openrouter.ai/settings/keys
• OpenRouter models: https://openrouter.ai/models
• Datadog API keys: https://docs.datadoghq.com/account_management/api-app-keys/

Implementation Details

For the OpenRouter setup, set these Railway variables:

PI_PROVIDER=openrouter
OPENROUTER_API_KEY=your_openrouter_api_key
OPENROUTER_MODEL=anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your_telegram_bot_token

You can change OPENROUTER_MODEL later if you want to switch models.

### Why Deploy Smooth Operator 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 Smooth Operator 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.