Deploy and Host Unkey on Railway

Unkey is an open-source API management platform that allows developers to secure their services with low-latency API key authentication. It provides out-of-the-box features such as rate limiting, usage tracking, and temporary keys, enabling you to build and scale your API infrastructure without creating a custom authentication layer from scratch.

About Hosting Unkey

Hosting Unkey involves deploying a high-performance Go-based backend alongside supporting data services. Unkey is designed for speed (targeting <40ms key verification), and its architecture relies on MySQL for persistent data such as API configs, key metadata, and encrypted hashes, and Redis for real-time state management and rate-limiting counters. The modern Unkey stack is fully self-hostable, meaning you can run the API entirely using open-source databases with no PlanetScale or Clerk dependencies required. Railway simplifies this process by provisioning databases automatically, injecting environment variables securely, and connecting services via a private internal network.

Why Deploy

Railway is a single platform for deploying full infrastructure stacks. With zero-config database provisioning, secure internal networking, automatic environment variable injection between services, and both vertical and horizontal scaling, Railway eliminates infrastructure management overhead

Common Use Cases

SaaS API Authentication — Issue and manage unique API keys for customers with built-in revocation and rotation
AI / LLM Usage Guardrails — Apply per-user rate limits and usage caps to prevent runaway AI costs
Microservices Gateway — Secure internal service-to-service communication using short-lived or metadata-tagged keys

Dependencies for Unkey Hosting

MySQL — Stores API configurations, key metadata, and encrypted key hashes
Redis — Provides high-speed rate limiting counters and distributed cache state

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

When configuring Unkey on Railway, the database URL must use the Go MySQL driver format and Redis must use the standard redis:// scheme: