Deploy and Host Strapi on Railway

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS that empowers developers to create stunning, content-rich applications with ease. The leading open-source headless CMS, 100% JavaScript/TypeScript, flexible and fully customizable.

About Hosting Strapi

With Strapi, you can manage your content in a customizable admin panel, which can be easily adapted to suit your specific needs. This powerful CMS provides you with complete control over your content, allowing you to create, edit, and publish content across multiple platforms and devices. With just one click, you can deploy your Strapi project to the Railway cloud platform, and in about 5 minutes of avg. build time: you get a template that gives you a foundation for your blogs and websites. When this template is running on Railway Strapi will connect to the Postgres Database through the private network, saving you on database egress fees.

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Common Use Cases

Content Management: Manage content for blogs and websites with a customizable admin panel
Multi-platform Publishing: Create, edit, and publish content across multiple platforms and devices
API Development: Build custom APIs, routes, and plugins for content delivery to any frontend

Dependencies for Strapi Hosting

The Railway template includes the required Node.js runtime and PostgreSQL database with pre-configured connections.

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Strapi Community Edition Features:

Modern Admin Panel: Elegant, entirely customizable and a fully extensible admin panel
Multi-database support: You can choose the database you prefer: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, and SQLite
Customizable: You can quickly build your logic by fully customizing APIs, routes, or plugins to fit your needs perfectly
Blazing Fast and Robust: Built on top of Node.js and TypeScript, Strapi delivers reliable and solid performance
Front-end Agnostic: Use any front-end framework (React, Next.js, Vue, Angular, etc.), mobile apps or even IoT
Secure by default: Reusable policies, CORS, CSP, P3P, Xframe, XSS, and more
Powerful CLI: Scaffold projects and APIs on the fly

Developing Locally:

When developing locally this Strapi template will connect to the Postgres server from its public TCP Proxy:

Within the service settings of the Strapi service click the Eject button on the upstream repository
Clone that newly created repository locally
Install Strapi's dependencies with yarn install or npm install
Install the Railway CLI with instructions found here
If this is your first time using the CLI make sure to login with railway login
Within the local repository run railway link to link the local repository to the Strapi service on Railway
Start Strapi for development with railway run yarn run develop or railway run npm run develop
This command will run Strapi in development mode with the service variables available locally
Open your browser to http://127.0.0.1:1337/admin

Why Deploy Strapi 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 Strapi 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.