Install n8n on Railway in 5 minutes

Set up your no-code workbench, even simpler

This is the first-ever guest post on the Lumberjack, brought to you by

Robert Andrei

. Robert kindly offered to write up a tutorial on hosting n8n on Railway after reading my similar tutorial on Digital Ocean setup:

Set up your no-code workbench

Robert runs the AI Without Hype Substack which I highly recommend you check out.

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Railway.app makes it easy to get n8n up and running with ready-to-use templates that save you time and hassle, offering a quick way to deploy and configure n8n.

You’ll get simple setup, built-in scalability, and budget-friendly pricing, everything you need for a solid no-code workbench.

Railway Pricing and Trials

Pricing is simple and flexible. You get a free trial ($5 worth of credits), then pay a subscription fee plus usage-based costs. The trial will give you 500MB of RAM and shared vCPU cores. Also if you haven’t yet, create a GitHub account and connect it to Railway so you get full functionality.

UPDATE: Some of you reported that deployment will fail unless you’re subscribed to a paid plan. So before continuing, make sure to sign up for the $5/month plan.

Installing n8n on Railway

Getting n8n set up on Railway.app is easy because the app does most of the work for you. Follow these steps to get your n8n instance running in no time:

1. Create accounts

Create a GitHub account if you don't have one already. This is necessary for logging into Railway

Sign up for a Railway: Affiliate Link or Non-Affiliate Link

2. Create a new project

Once logged in, navigate to the Railway dashboard and select "New"

You will be presented with this screen:

Click “Deploy a template.”

On the next screen, search for either “N8N (w/ worker)” or “N8N (w/ webhook processors),” both published by Jack.

If your automations use webhooks, go with the webhook processors option. If not, stick with the worker option. If you don’t know, choose the webhook option.

Once you’ve picked your template, make sure everything checks out and click “Deploy” - everything works right out of the box.

Railway will automatically set up the necessary components, including the n8n instance, database, Redis and worker / webhook nodes.

After a minute or two your deployment is completed and you will be on this screen:

Of course, something always has to go wrong during a tutorial. For me, the Redis node ended up overlapping the n8n primary node. If this happens to you, just drag the overlapping node to an empty spot. You should see 4 services if you chose the template without webhooks, or 5 if you went with the webhook version.

The hard part’s over. Your personal n8n instance is up and running.

To access it, just select the Primary node, head to settings, and copy your public URL.

When accessing the URL you will be asked to create an owner account.

Enter your details, and you’ll land on the main n8n dashboard. Fill out a quick questionnaire, and n8n will hook you up with a license key that unlocks some paid features - for free, forever.

They say it's a time limited offer so this may or may not be true in the future.

Once you receive your licence key, go to Settings / Usage and plan and enter it there to unlock the community edition of n8n

And you are done! n8n is ready to go.

Start building

Next, to learn how to get more out of n8n, here are a few options:

• Sign up to the 100 Days of No-Code free email course that launches March 1st. You will get 100 ready to use no-code workflows in your inbox, one a day, every day for 100 days. Sign up here: https://kit.lumberjack.so/100days

• Subscribe to AI Without Hype where you’ll get more practical tips in your inbox regularly.

About Robert:

I’ve built, failed, experimented, and figured out what works for 20 years. I thrive in cut to the bone, messy progress and now I write about it. If you want no fluff, no gimmick tips and tools to help you grow using AI, subscribe to AI Without Hype and let's get to work.

PS: If you want to write a guest post on something practical, drop me an email reply!