Deploy and Host Uptrace on Railway

Uptrace is an OpenTelemetry-native APM for distributed tracing, logs and metrics. It stores telemetry in ClickHouse, groups spans and logs automatically, and offers dashboards, alerts and a query language, so it works as a self-hosted alternative to Datadog, New Relic or a Grafana tracing stack.

About Hosting Uptrace

This template runs uptrace/uptrace:2.0.3, the latest stable release, with ClickHouse for telemetry, Railway PostgreSQL for metadata and Railway Redis as a cache. The config file is written at startup from variables, and the admin user, an organisation, a project and its ingest token are seeded on first boot. Apps send OpenTelemetry data over OTLP/HTTP to the public domain with the uptrace-dsn header; requests with a wrong token are refused. gRPC ingest stays on the private network. ClickHouse data is on a volume, so telemetry survives redeploys. Plan on 2 GB of memory or more; ClickHouse is the main consumer.

Common Use Cases

Tracing requests across microservices with OpenTelemetry
Central logs and metrics for apps running on Railway
Alerts on error rates and latency without a SaaS bill

Dependencies for Uptrace Hosting

uptrace/uptrace:2.0.3 (official image)
clickhouse/clickhouse-server:26.3.33.24 (official image)
Railway PostgreSQL and Railway Redis

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Service	Source	Networking	Storage
uptrace	`uptrace/uptrace:2.0.3`	public domain on 8080 (UI + OTLP/HTTP), private gRPC 4317	none
clickhouse	`clickhouse/clickhouse-server:26.3.33.24`	private	volume at `/var/lib/clickhouse`
Postgres	Railway PostgreSQL	private	Railway volume
Redis	Railway Redis	private	Railway volume

Variable	Default	Purpose
`UPTRACE_ADMIN_EMAIL`	`admin@example.com`	Admin user (first boot only)
`UPTRACE_ADMIN_PASSWORD`	generated	Its password
`UPTRACE_PROJECT_TOKEN`	generated	Ingest token in the DSN
`UPTRACE_SECRET`	generated	Signs sessions
`UPTRACE_CONFIG`	template	Full `config.yml`, with `${VAR}` placeholders

Notes:

DSN for OpenTelemetry SDKs: https://@?grpc=4317, sent over HTTP.
Edit UPTRACE_CONFIG to enable SMTP alerts or change retention.

This is a community-maintained deployment package and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by Uptrace.

Why Deploy Uptrace 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 Uptrace 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.