Deploy and Host Typebot on Railway

Typebot is an open-source chatbot builder that provides a visual, drag-and-drop interface for creating interactive conversational experiences. It enables the creation of engaging chatbots, conversational forms, and automated workflows without requiring extensive coding knowledge, making it ideal for lead generation, customer support, surveys, and user engagement.

About Hosting Typebot

Hosting Typebot gives you access to a powerful chatbot creation platform capable of handling multiple concurrent conversations, managing user interactions, and integrating with various external services. Typebot offers a visual flow builder, conditional logic, data collection capabilities, and webhook integrations. The platform excels at creating engaging user experiences through interactive conversations, automated responses, and seamless data capture. Typebot deployments benefit from scalable resources and Railway's private network capabilities for secure integrations to services like Valkey, Postgres, and MinIO.

Common Use Cases

• Lead Generation: Creating interactive forms and chatbots that capture qualified leads through engaging conversations, replacing traditional static forms with dynamic experiences.

• Customer Support: Building automated support bots that can handle common inquiries, route complex issues to human agents, and provide 24/7 assistance to users.

• Surveys and Feedback: Designing conversational surveys that feel more natural than traditional forms, increasing completion rates and gathering more detailed user insights.

• Onboarding and Tutorials: Creating interactive onboarding experiences that guide users through products or services with personalized conversation flows.

Dependencies for Typebot Hosting

• Postgres - Storage for Typebot data

• Valkey (Redis alternative) - Caching for Typebot

• MinIO (S3 alternative) - Storage for Typebot media

• MinIO Console (S3 console alternative) - Management of MinIO

• MinIO Bucket Creator (S3 bucket creator) - Creation of MinIO buckets on first launch

Deployment Dependencies

• Typebot images - https://hub.docker.com/u/baptistearno

• Typebot GitHub - https://github.com/baptisteArno/typebot.io

• Railway Postgres template - https://railway.com/template/postgres

• Valkey template - https://railway.com/template/pQYeJx

• MinIO template - https://railway.com/template/SMKOEA

Implementation Details

• MinIO is used in place of a 3rd party S3 storage provider, Using MinIO in this template allows you to upload media during the bot creation flow and have the bot send the uploaded media back to the users during a chat with the bot.

• The "MinIO Bucket Creator" Is a service to create a public "typebot" bucket in the MinIO service, Typebot will use this bucket to upload media into, the bucket is set to public because your bot would need to be able to send the media to the users who are chatting with the bot. This Service only needs to run once, you may delete it after the logs of the service indicate that it was run successfully.

• Upon changing the Railway domain or adding your own custom domain to the service, you will need to redeploy both the "Viewer" and the "Builder" services, this is so that they are aware of the new domains in use.

• Using Gmail as an SMTP host is known to not work on Railway services, this is not limited to Typebot deployments.

• Updating Typebot is as easy as redeploying the "Builder" and "Viewer" services.

Why Deploy Typebot 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 scale it.

By deploying Typebot on Railway, you get a complete chatbot building platform with minimal setup. Railway handles the infrastructure provisioning, environment configuration, and automatic deployments, letting you focus on creating engaging conversational experiences.