--- title: "Deploy Typesense Real Estate" description: "listings, map radius, and facet filters" category: "Analytics" url: https://railway.com/deploy/typesense-real-estate --- # Deploy Typesense Real Estate listings, map radius, and facet filters **[Deploy Typesense Real Estate on Railway](https://railway.com/template/typesense-real-estate)** Machine-readable deploy manifest (JSON, validated by TemplateCI): https://railway.com/deploy/typesense-real-estate/manifest.json - **Creator:** onepush - **Category:** Analytics ## Template content ### typesense-railway - **Source:** Shinyduo/typesense-railway - **Public domain:** Yes ## Documentation # Deploy and Host self hosted Typesense Real Estate (Open-Source Instant Search) on Railway Typesense Real Estate is Typesense OSS on Railway, set up for property portals: typo-tolerant address lookup, map radius and polygon filters, and price, beds, and baths facets that update while the buyer is still typing. ## About Hosting Typesense Real Estate open-source software on Railway (self hosted Typesense template) A property search box that returns typo-tolerant hits in 40 ms stops being a feature and becomes the product. Self-hosted Typesense does that for listings: addresses, neighborhoods, price bands, bedrooms. Typesense handles structured and free-text fields: a geopoint for radius and polygon filters, integers for price and beds, strings with typo tolerance. It is in-memory, so RAM is the number you size. ## Why Deploy Typesense Real Estate, the Algolia alternative on Railway (Railway Free Trial) Algolia works beautifully until the invoice lands. Grow bills search requests and records stored, so a busy open-house weekend shows up on the bill. Typesense flips that: GPL-3.0 open source, self-hosted, paid in compute and storage instead of keystrokes. Listing search is high-query and low-write, which is exactly where per-request pricing hurts. Railway's $5 GitHub trial lets you test without a procurement conversation. Load your listings and see how "redondo beach condo under 800k" resolves. 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 Typesense Real Estate 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 vs Other Hosting Providers and VPS for Typesense Real Estate self hosting | Provider | What you manage yourself | Fit for Typesense Real Estate | |---|---|---| | DigitalOcean | Droplet sizing, Docker, reverse proxy, TLS, volume snapshots, monitoring | Workable, but you'll script health checks and redeploys by hand | | AWS | EC2, EBS, security groups, IAM, CloudWatch, load balancer rules | Full control, heavier setup than a single search node needs | | Hetzner | Cloud VM or bare metal, disk, firewall, backups | Cheap compute, but orchestration and uptime are on you | Railway's advantage is narrow but real: one service, an attached volume, port 8108, and a health check you set once. ## Common Use Cases for hosted Typesense Real Estate A property portal's search bar does five jobs, most invisible until they break. 1. **Address and neighborhood lookup.** Buyers type "brookline", "brookln", or "BROOKLINE ma". Typo tolerance absorbs one or two character slips per word. 2. **Map radius and polygon filtering.** A buyer draws a shape around a commute corridor; you pass the center and radius, or the polygon vertices, straight into `filter_by`. 3. **Price, beds, and baths facets.** Integer facets keep sidebar counts honest as filters narrow. 4. **Sort by price or distance.** Use `sort_by=price:asc`, or `geo(42.33, -71.12):asc` to put the closest homes first. 5. **Saved search alerts.** Store the filter string, re-run it nightly, and push new matches. Overnight alert queries cost compute, not fees. ## Dependencies for Typesense Real Estate Docker hosted on Railway The dependency list is short on purpose: one container, one volume, one secret. ### Deployment Dependencies for Managed Typesense Real Estate Service (Property Listing Search) The container needs the official image pinned to `typesense/typesense:30.2`, a writable `/data` directory on a Railway volume, and `TYPESENSE_API_KEY` set before start. The key isn't optional; Typesense won't boot without it, a classic first-deploy failure. Keep `--enable-cors` on if your browser client calls the API directly. Without CORS the browser blocks responses with an error that looks like an outage. ### Implementation Details for Typesense Real Estate (Using Typesense official docker image) Set the service image to `typesense/typesense:30.2`, never `latest`; surprise upgrades on a live index are no fun. Start command: `--data-dir /data --api-key=$TYPESENSE_API_KEY --enable-cors`. Attach the volume at `/data`; without it, every deploy wipes the index and you re-import. Point Railway's health check at `GET /health` on 8108 so a deploy isn't marked healthy before the index has loaded. A workable schema: string `address`, `neighborhood`, `city`; int32 `price`, `beds`, `baths`; geopoint `geo`. Facet neighborhood, city, beds, and baths. Import through `/collections/properties/documents/import` and use the MLS listing ID as the document `id`, so re-imports update instead of duplicating. ## How does Typesense Real Estate compare against other Real Estate Search platforms Real estate search is a pressure test: bad address typing, numeric filters, and a map that must keep up with a thumb. ### Typesense Real Estate vs Algolia (Algolia Alternative) Algolia wins on managed polish and dashboards, but it is SaaS-only and the bill scales with requests and records. Self-hosted Typesense keeps the data with you and charges compute. The trade: uptime and backups are yours. ### Typesense Real Estate vs Elasticsearch (Elasticsearch Alternative) Elasticsearch can do everything here and more, but a JVM node wants gigabytes of heap and the DSL is verbose. Typesense reads closer to a database query with `filter_by`, `sort_by`, and `facet_by`. Elasticsearch wins for custom analyzers and complex scoring. ### Typesense Real Estate vs Meilisearch (Meilisearch Alternative) Meilisearch is the closest cousin. For listings the question is geo. Check that its radius, bounding box, and polygon filters cover your map UI before committing. If the map drives everything, Typesense's geo filters are well worn. ### Typesense Real Estate vs Solr (Solr Alternative) Solr has indexed real estate for two decades. Setup is a project, though: `schema.xml`, JVM tuning, specialist syntax. For focused listing search with geo facets, Typesense reaches production faster. ## How to use Typesense Real Estate (the OSS Property Listing Search)? Everything happens over HTTP on port 8108: create a collection, import documents, query. A typical query: `GET /collections/properties/documents/search?q=maplewood&query_by=address,neighborhood,city&filter_by=price:<=600000 && beds:>=3&facet_by=neighborhood,beds,baths&sort_by=price:asc`. For a map radius, filter with `geo:(42.33, -71.12, 5 mi)`. For a drawn shape, pass the vertices in order: `geo:(lat1, lon1, lat2, lon2, lat3, lon3, ...)`. Hits sorted by distance come back with the distance attached. On the frontend, wire `typesense-instantsearch-adapter` to your Railway URL with a search-only key and re-query on each Leaflet or Mapbox map move. ## How to self host Typesense Real Estate on other VPS Services (Typesense Real Estate self hosting guide) ### Clone the Repository Typesense is a single C++ binary, and you don't need to build it. The practical "clone" is `docker pull typesense/typesense:30.2`. ### Install Dependencies Install Docker and Docker Compose. That's it: no PostgreSQL, Redis, or JVM. ### Configure Environment Variables Set `TYPESENSE_API_KEY` to a long random string. In Compose, map a host directory to `/data` inside the container so the index survives restarts. ### Start the Typesense Real Estate Application Run `docker run -d -p 8108:8108 -v ts-data:/data typesense/typesense:30.2 --data-dir /data --api-key=$TYPESENSE_API_KEY --enable-cors`. Create the collection, import listings, and put a reverse proxy with TLS in front of 8108 before going public. ## Official Pricing of Typesense Real Estate (Typesense Real Estate pricing) The software is free under GPL-3.0. Typesense Cloud bills dedicated RAM and vCPU hourly plus bandwidth, with no per-search fee: a 0.5 GB burst node is about $21.60/month and a 2 GB burst node runs roughly $43 to $51/month. ## Typesense Real Estate cloud vs self hosted comparison (Pricing, features, costs, and more) The choice comes down to who gets paged at 3 a.m. and who owns the data. ### Monthly cost of self hosting Typesense Real Estate on Railway On Railway you pay compute plus the volume, typically single-digit to low-teens USD per month for a small node. Pay for Cloud if downtime costs you leads. ### System Requirements for Hosting Typesense Real Estate on a VPS RAM is the hard requirement. Budget roughly two to three times the raw JSON size of your listings; long descriptions add up fast. CPU matters most during bulk imports. Avoid swap; it makes queries stutter. ## Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) ### Do I need a separate database for my property listings? Usually you keep one. Most teams leave PostgreSQL or the MLS feed as the source of truth and sync changes into Typesense. ### Can I use Typesense Real Estate for polygon search on a map? Yes. Pass the polygon vertices in a geo filter, filter listings inside the shape, then sort by price or distance. ### What happens if I lose the TYPESENSE_API_KEY? The bootstrap key is a startup flag, so set a new `TYPESENSE_API_KEY` and redeploy; the index on `/data` survives. Update every backend that used the old key. ### How does typo tolerance work for addresses and neighborhoods? By default Typesense allows up to two typos per word, so "becon hil" still finds Beacon Hill. Tune `num_typos` per query if short street names get too fuzzy. ### Can I run multiple Typesense nodes for high availability? Yes, Typesense supports Raft clustering, but most listing search runs fine on one node with a volume. ### Is self-hosting Typesense fine for a commercial real estate site? Yes. Running the unmodified GPL-3.0 server behind your site carries no license fee. GPL obligations kick in only if you distribute a modified binary. ## Similar templates - [Formbricks | Open-Source Typeform & Qualtrics Alternative](https://railway.com/deploy/formbricks-surveys) — Surveys, NPS and in-app feedback on your own Postgres, Hub and Cube - [Typesense PHP](https://railway.com/deploy/typesense-php) — official PHP client against Railway - [Typesense vs Meilisearch](https://railway.com/deploy/typesense-vs-meilisearch) — self-hosted Typesense vs Meilisearch Open this page in a browser: https://railway.com/deploy/typesense-real-estate