Deploy and Host Thumbor on Railway

Thumbor is an open-source smart imaging service that performs on-the-fly image resizing, cropping, smart focal detection, format conversion (WebP/AVIF/JPEG/PNG), filters, and optimization. It’s commonly used behind a CDN to deliver fast, responsive images from a single master asset, reducing bandwidth and improving page performance across web and mobile apps.

About Hosting honest-connection

Hosting Thumbor on Railway involves running the Thumbor server with a configuration that defines security keys, allowed sources, storage backends, and performance parameters. You can bring your own object storage (e.g., S3, GCS) for original images and use Redis or filesystem for result storage and caching. For production, enable a reverse proxy/CDN in front of Thumbor, configure smart detection (face/feature), and tune CPU/memory according to expected QPS and image sizes. Railway’s ephemeral previews and simple variables management make it easy to iterate on filters and settings safely, while vertical/horizontal scaling keeps throughput smooth under load.

Common Use Cases

• Dynamic responsive images (resize, crop, WebP/AVIF conversion) for websites and apps
• Smart focal cropping (faces/objects) for thumbnails and social previews
• On-the-fly transformations for multi-tenant CMS/ecommerce media pipelines

Dependencies for honest-connection Hosting

• Python-based Thumbor server with required Thumbor plugins

Deployment Dependencies

• Thumbor Git repository or container image

• Object storage bucket (e.g., Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage) if using remote storage

• CDN or reverse proxy (e.g., Cloudflare, Fastly, Nginx) for caching and edge delivery

Why Deploy honest-connection 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 Thumbor 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.

For further reading and a step-by-step tutorial, check out the full blog guide here. To get started immediately, use the n8n Railway deployment link.