Deploy and Host Workflow DevKit on Railway

Workflow DevKit is a durable execution framework for JavaScript and TypeScript. It lets you build long-running, stateful workflows that can pause, resume, retry, and survive restarts, with built-in observability for inspecting runs, steps, and events.

About This Template

This template deploys a minimal self-hosted Workflow DevKit setup on Railway using the Postgres World. It runs the Workflow postgres demo app and also hosts the Workflow observability UI, both connected to the same PostgreSQL database.

The app exposes a simple signup endpoint that starts a durable workflow run. The observability deployment lets you inspect the run, its steps, timing, and status in the browser. This template is intended as a simple starter for running workflows outside of Vercel with durable state, a long-running worker process, and a live dashboard powered by Workflow’s observability web package.

Important: the observability UI in this template is intentionally unauthenticated for demo purposes. Anyone with the public URL can access it. For real deployments, you should keep observability private on an internal network, or fork the packages/web package from the Workflow repository and add your own authentication.

How to Test the Deployment

After deploying, trigger a workflow run with:

curl -X POST \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{"email":"[email protected]"}' \
  https://YOUR-APP-URL/api/signup

You should get back:

{"message":"User signup workflow started"}

Then open your observability deployment URL to watch the run progress and confirm that it completes successfully.

Common Use Cases

• Durable AI agents that need to pause, resume, retry, and keep state across long-running tasks.
• ETL and data pipeline jobs that coordinate multiple steps and external systems.
• Batch processing and background jobs such as imports, reports, syncs, and scheduled tasks.

Dependencies for Workflow DevKit Hosting

This template already includes the infrastructure needed to get started on Railway:

• A PostgreSQL database for the Postgres World.
• A long-running Railway service for the demo app.
• A long-running Railway service for the hosted observability UI.

Deployment Dependencies

• Workflow DevKit documentation
• Observability documentation
• Postgres World documentation
• Workflow GitHub repository
• Observability web package (packages/web)

Why Deploy Workflow DevKit on Railway?

Railway is a single platform for deploying your application and infrastructure together. It handles the operational setup so you can focus on running durable workflows without managing the underlying platform details yourself.

By deploying Workflow DevKit on Railway, you get a straightforward way to host your app, PostgreSQL-backed workflow runtime, and observability UI in one place.