Deploy and Host Stirling PDF with Railway

Stirling PDF is a powerful self-hosted PDF toolkit with 50+ tools for merging, splitting, compressing, converting, OCR, signing, redacting, watermarking, and organizing PDF documents. This Railway template gives you a ready-to-run Stirling PDF instance with authentication, persistent storage, HTTPS, and REST API access without managing your own server or Docker infrastructure.

About Hosting Stirling PDF

Stirling PDF is a self-hosted alternative to online PDF tools and desktop PDF software. It provides a single web interface for everyday PDF workflows including merge, split, compression, OCR, conversion, signing, redaction, watermarking, page manipulation, and more.

With this Railway template, Stirling PDF runs on your own Railway infrastructure. Your documents are processed by your deployed instance instead of being sent to a third-party PDF processing service.

This template is configured with authentication, persistent configuration storage, a Railway health check, public HTTPS networking, and API access.

Common Use Cases

Private PDF processing — Process contracts, invoices, reports, and other sensitive documents on infrastructure you control.
Adobe Acrobat alternative — Handle common PDF workflows with a self-hosted web application.
OCR and document digitization — Extract text from scanned PDFs and make documents searchable.
Office document conversion — Convert supported Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other documents to PDF.
PDF automation — Use the REST API to automate document processing from applications, scripts, and workflows.

Dependencies for Stirling PDF Hosting

Stirling PDF — The core PDF application and web interface.
Official Stirling PDF Docker image — Used as the application runtime.
Railway persistent volume — Used to preserve Stirling PDF configuration and persistent application state.
Railway HTTPS networking — Provides public HTTPS access to the deployed application.
Railway health checks — Used to determine whether the Stirling PDF service is ready to receive traffic.

Deployment Dependencies

Stirling PDF documentation: https://docs.stirlingpdf.com/
Stirling PDF GitHub repository: https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF
Railway documentation: https://docs.railway.com/

Why Deploy Stirling PDF on Railway?

Railway removes much of the infrastructure work normally required to self-host Stirling PDF.

With this template, you can deploy a persistent Stirling PDF instance without manually configuring a server, Docker runtime, reverse proxy, or storage volume.

Railway provides the infrastructure layer while Stirling PDF provides the PDF processing application.

You get:

One-click deployment
Public HTTPS
Authentication
Persistent storage
Health checks
REST API access
Self-hosted PDF processing
Easy resource scaling through Railway

Features

50+ PDF tools
Merge and split PDFs
Compress and optimize PDFs
OCR for scanned documents
Convert supported documents to and from PDF
Sign and redact documents
Rotate, crop, watermark, and reorganize pages
REST API for automation
Authentication and user management
Persistent application configuration

Privacy and Security

Your documents are processed by your deployed Stirling PDF instance rather than by a third-party PDF processing SaaS.

However, Railway is still cloud infrastructure. Review your organization's security, privacy, compliance, and data-retention requirements before processing regulated or highly sensitive documents.

Keep authentication enabled, protect API keys, use strong credentials, and maintain backups of important persistent data.

API

Stirling PDF provides a REST API for programmatic PDF processing.

You can use it with:

backend applications
automation workflows
scripts
internal business tools
document pipelines

After deployment, use the API documentation exposed by your Stirling PDF instance for the exact endpoints and authentication method supported by the installed version.

Resource Requirements

PDF processing, OCR, and Office document conversion can be CPU- and memory-intensive.

Start with a reasonable Railway configuration and increase CPU or memory when processing larger documents, using OCR heavily, or running multiple operations concurrently.

Actual resource requirements depend on document size, processing type, and concurrency.

Updating Stirling PDF

This template uses a specific tested Stirling PDF image version instead of relying on an unpinned latest tag.

Pinning the image version makes deployments more predictable.

Before upgrading, back up important persistent data and test the new version.

Persistence and Backups

A persistent Railway volume is used for Stirling PDF application state and configuration.

Back up important persistent data according to the requirements of your deployment.

Railway persistence should not be treated as a complete disaster-recovery strategy by itself.

Upstream Project

This template deploys the existing Stirling PDF project on Railway.

It does not replace or modify Stirling PDF itself.

Stirling PDF: https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

Official documentation: https://docs.stirlingpdf.com/

Community Template

This is a community-maintained Railway deployment template for Stirling PDF.

It is not an official Stirling Tools product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Stirling Tools.

For Stirling PDF application issues, consult the upstream project and documentation.

For Railway deployment issues, use Railway's documentation and support resources.

License

Review the current Stirling PDF project and component licenses before using this template in commercial or production environments.

This template provides Railway deployment configuration for the upstream Stirling PDF project and does not claim ownership of Stirling PDF.