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Railway

A quick guide on deploying Steel Browser to Railway using our template

Deploy the Template on Railway ↗

Overview

Hosting Steel Browser on Railway provides a reliable, scalable environment for running headless Chrome instances. The Steel Browser API handles browser session management, proxy configuration, and CDP passthroughs while Railway provides extremely easy APIs to scale and handles resource allocation automatically. Running Steel Browser on Railway's infrastructure ensures your browser automations run consistently with minimal configuration, while providing automatic scaling and health monitoring for production workloads.

Common Use Cases

  • Web Scraping: Extract data from dynamic websites that require JavaScript rendering

  • Browser Automation: Automate repetitive web tasks and workflows

  • End-to-End Testing: Run automated browser tests for web applications

  • Screenshot & PDF Generation: Capture screenshots or generate PDFs from web content

  • Data Collection: Gather information from multiple web sources programmatically

Dependencies for Hosting Steel Browser

  • Docker: Steel Browser runs as a containerized application

  • Chrome/Chromium: Headless browser engine (included in the Docker image)

  • Node.js Runtime: Required for the Steel Browser service

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Health Check Endpoint:

Verify your instance is running:

curl https://your-domain.railway.app/v1/health

Connecting to Steel Browser:

After deployment, create a session and connect to your Steel Browser instance on the public domain using Playwright:

import { chromium } from "playwright";
import Steel from "steel-sdk";

const client = new Steel({
  baseUrl: `https://${process.env.RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}`,
});

session = await client.sessions.create();
browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP(session.websocketUrl);

// The rest of your automation

Why Deploy Steel Browser 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 Steel Browser 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.

Benefits of Steel Browser on Railway:

  • Automatic HTTPS/SSL configuration

  • Built-in health monitoring

  • Easy scaling as your browser automation needs grow

  • Simple environment variable management

  • Seamless integration with other Railway services

Post-Deployment Notes

After deploying this template, users should:

  1. Access the Instance: Navigate to the Railway-provided public domain

  2. Verify Health: Check the /v1/health endpoint returns a successful response

  3. Configure API Access: Use the public domain URL in their application code

  4. Monitor Usage: Check Railway's metrics dashboard for resource usage

Security Considerations

  • Consider adding authentication if exposing publicly or only enabling private networking

  • Monitor for unusual traffic patterns

  • Set up rate limiting if needed for production use