Deploy and Host Steel Trader — Inventory Management on Railway

Steel Trader is a full-stack inventory and order management system for SMBs — steel traders, building material distributors, and commodity businesses. Track purchase orders, manage stock lots by receipt, process sales with partial dispatches, and control team access with role-based permissions. Built on FastAPI + React + Tailwind CSS.

About Hosting Steel Trader — Inventory Management

Hosting Steel Trader on Railway deploys two services from a single repository: a Python FastAPI backend and a React + Vite frontend. The backend handles all business logic — purchase and sale order lifecycle, stock lot tracking, JWT authentication — and connects to either a Railway PostgreSQL addon (recommended for production) or SQLite (zero-config for demos). The frontend is a static React app served via npx serve. On first boot, the backend automatically creates the database schema and seeds an admin user using environment variables you configure. No manual database migrations or shell access required — Railway handles the entire build and deployment pipeline.

Common Use Cases

1. Steel distributors and building-material traders tracking incoming stock and outgoing truck dispatches
2. Small manufacturing businesses managing raw material purchases and fulfillment of sale orders
3. Any commodity business needing partial-fulfillment order tracking (one purchase → multiple receipts, one sale → multiple dispatches)

Dependencies for Steel Trader — Inventory Management Hosting

• Python 3.11 (auto-provisioned by Railway Nixpacks)
• Node.js 18+ (auto-provisioned by Railway Nixpacks)

Deployment Dependencies

Railway PostgreSQL addon — optional but recommended for production; set DATABASE_URL to the addon URL. Defaults to SQLite if not provided. FastAPI docs — backend framework Vite — frontend build tool

Implementation Details

The backend start.sh runs two steps on every deploy:

1. Auto-creates all DB tables (idempotent)

2. Seeds admin user from env vars (skipped if user already exists)

python3 -c "Base.metadata.create_all(bind=engine); ... seed admin ..." exec uvicorn app.main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT

Set VITE_API_URL on the web service to https:///api/v1. Using Railway reference variables: ${{backend.RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}.

Why Deploy Steel Trader — Inventory Management 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 Trader — Inventory Management 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.

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 Trader — Inventory Management 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.