Deploy Unleash

Deploy and Host Unleash on Railway

Unleash is an open-source feature management platform. Teams create feature flags with gradual rollouts, targeting, variants and environments in a web UI, and applications evaluate them locally through official SDKs for Node.js, Java, Go, Python, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Rust and frontend frameworks. Flags change instantly without redeploying.

About Hosting Unleash

This template deploys Unleash v8.2.0 with a Railway Postgres database. The admin account is admin with a password generated at deploy time, so the well-known default password never exists. A backend API token for the development environment is created on first start, so an SDK can connect immediately. Database migrations run automatically on boot. Unleash listens on IPv4 and IPv6, so services on the same project can use the private URL. It is light enough for the Hobby plan. Create more tokens and environments in the admin UI. Back up Postgres regularly.

Common Use Cases

• Gradual rollouts, kill switches and A/B variants for web and mobile apps
• Trunk-based development with flags instead of long-lived branches
• Self-hosted feature flags where data must stay in your own database

Dependencies for Unleash Hosting

• unleashorg/unleash-server:8.2.0 (official image)
• Railway Postgres (ghcr.io/railwayapp-templates/postgres-ssl:18) with a volume

Deployment Dependencies

• Unleash documentation
• Unleash v8.2.0 release
• Unleash SDKs
• Railway private networking

Implementation Details

Node.js SDK from another Railway service:

const unleash = initialize({
  url: process.env.UNLEASH_API_URL,          // ${{unleash.UNLEASH_PRIVATE_API_URL}}
  appName: "my-app",
  customHeaders: { Authorization: process.env.UNLEASH_TOKEN }, // ${{unleash.INIT_BACKEND_API_TOKENS}}
});

Notes:

• INIT_*_API_TOKENS only create tokens when the database has none; change tokens in the UI afterwards.
• Frontend SDKs need a frontend token; create one in the admin UI and set UNLEASH_FRONTEND_API_ORIGINS if needed.

This is a community-maintained deployment package and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by the Unleash project or its maintainers.

Why Deploy Unleash 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 Unleash 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.