Deploy and Host Stirling PDF on Railway

Stirling PDF is a self-hosted, browser-based toolbox for everyday PDF work — merge, split, compress, convert, OCR, sign, and redact documents from one private web app. It's a self-hosted alternative to iLovePDF, Smallpdf, and Adobe's online PDF tools. This template runs Stirling PDF on infrastructure you control, so sensitive files never get uploaded to a third-party website.

About Hosting Stirling PDF

Hosting your own Stirling PDF gives you a full PDF toolkit without handing your documents to a random online converter. Contracts, scanned IDs, tax paperwork, and confidential reports are processed on your own server instead of someone else's upload queue, and you keep complete ownership and control of every file.

This template is ready to run: Railway provisions the container, storage, and public HTTPS URL for you, so you get a working Stirling PDF instance in a couple of minutes with no low-level server setup. Analytics are turned off by default in this deployment.

Stirling PDF is also one of the apps in My Own Suite, an open-source, all-in-one private cloud you can self-host — files, documents, photos, passwords, calendars, and PDF tools in a single suite. If you like running your own Stirling PDF, the My Own Suite documentation shows how it fits alongside the rest of your private cloud, with more self-hosting guides over at Funkyton.

Common Use Cases

• Merge, split, rotate, and compress PDFs without uploading them to a third-party converter.
• OCR scanned documents so old paperwork and receipts become searchable and selectable.
• Sign, redact, and convert sensitive files locally, keeping confidential documents off public upload sites.
• Test Stirling PDF on Railway before moving it to your own server or VPS as part of a larger private cloud.

Dependencies for Stirling PDF Hosting

• A Railway account

Pricing and plan requirements

Railway offers a free trial with starter credits and up to 5 services per project, which is plenty to spin Stirling PDF up and try it out. For ongoing use, a Hobby plan (or higher) keeps the app running continuously. Stirling PDF is lightweight — it runs as a single web service with modest CPU and memory needs — so it's an inexpensive app to keep online.

Deployment Dependencies

• Stirling PDF on My Own Suite: https://myownsuite.org/docs/apps/stirling-pdf/
• My Own Suite website: https://myownsuite.org/
• Getting started guide: https://myownsuite.org/docs/getting-started
• My Own Suite on GitHub: https://github.com/rpuls/my-own-suite
• Funkyton self-hosting guides: https://funkyton.com/
• Stirling PDF project: https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

Implementation Details

• No account, secret, or first-run configuration is required — the app is ready once Railway starts it.
• Internal HTTP port: 8080; health endpoint /api/v1/info/status.
• Analytics disabled by default via SYSTEM_ENABLEANALYTICS=false (turns off the app's optional PostHog and Scarf telemetry).
• Persistent storage is kept in volumes for /configs, /customFiles, /logs, /pipeline, and OCR training data at /usr/share/tessdata.

Why Deploy Stirling PDF on Railway?

Railway is the fastest way to get Stirling PDF online. You deploy this template with one click, and Railway handles the container, persistent storage, networking, and a public HTTPS URL — no Docker commands or low-level server administration required. Start on the free trial to try it out, then scale up on a paid plan when Stirling PDF becomes part of your everyday document workflow.