Deploy and Host Steel Browser on Railway

Steel Browser is an open-source headless browser API purpose-built for AI agents and automation. It runs managed Chromium sessions with a REST API and a Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) endpoint, so Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium, browser-use, Stagehand and LangChain agents can drive a real browser without you managing Chrome yourself. It adds session management, a live session viewer, proxy support, cookie/context persistence, PDF and screenshot capture, and anti-bot-friendly defaults.

About Hosting Steel Browser

This template deploys the official ghcr.io/steel-dev/steel-browser image as one service on port 3000 with a public domain and a /v1/health check. DOMAIN is wired to your Railway public domain and USE_SSL=true, so the API returns correct wss:// CDP URLs and the built-in session viewer works over HTTPS. CDP_REDIRECT_PORT keeps DevTools connections working behind Railway's proxy. Steel is stateless (sessions live in memory), so no volume is needed. Give it 1–2 GB of RAM for a handful of concurrent sessions; Railway's usage-based billing means idle time is nearly free.

Common Use Cases

Browser tool for AI agents (browser-use, Stagehand, OpenAI Agents, LangChain, CrewAI)
Headless scraping and form automation with Puppeteer or Playwright
Screenshots and PDFs of pages on demand via REST
QA and monitoring bots that need a real browser in the cloud

Dependencies for Steel Browser Hosting

Docker image ghcr.io/steel-dev/steel-browser:latest (bundles Chromium)
Nothing else — no database, no volume

Implementation Details

Connect Puppeteer to a new session:

import puppeteer from "puppeteer-core";
const browser = await puppeteer.connect({ browserWSEndpoint: "wss:///" });

REST API docs: https:///documentation. Create a session with POST /v1/sessions, then watch it live at https:///v1/sessions//viewer (the open-source build ships without auth — put it behind a private network or add a proxy with an API key if you expose it publicly).

Why Deploy Steel Browser 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 Steel Browser 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.