Installing with Railway

This guide walks you through deploying Hydrodactyl on Railway using the community-maintained one-click template. The template provisions the panel together with MariaDB and Redis.

Prerequisites

• A Railway account
• A domain name (recommended) — Railway can also issue you a *.up.railway.app domain
• A separate machine or provider for Pterodactyl Wings if you want to run game servers. Railway only hosts the panel, its database, and its cache.

What the template creates

Deploying the Hydrodactyl template creates three services in a new Railway project:

Railway automatically wires the panel to MariaDB and Redis over its private network and generates the required secrets (APP_KEY, HASHIDS_SALT, database and Redis passwords) for you.

Panel installation

1. Deploy the template

   Open the Hydrodactyl template, sign in to Railway if prompted, and click Deploy Now. Choose the workspace and project you want it in, then confirm.

2. Wait for the services to come up

   Railway builds all three services. The panel reports healthy once its /up endpoint responds and the database migrations have run. You can follow progress in the Deployments tab of the Hydrodactyl service.

3. Expose the panel

   Open the Hydrodactyl service, go to Settings → Networking, and click Generate Domain. To use your own domain instead, add it under Custom Domain and follow Railway's DNS instructions.

4. Point APP_URL at your domain

   The template derives APP_URL from the Railway-provided domain. If you attached a custom domain, update the APP_URL variable on the Hydrodactyl service to https://your-domain and redeploy. The panel uses this value for links and for the queue/cron jobs.

5. Create your administrator account

   Visit the panel at the configured URL. With no accounts on the system yet, the panel's built-in initial admin creation suite will guide you through creating the first administrator account.

Post-installation configuration

1. Panel setup:

   • Access your panel at the configured domain
   • Log in with your admin account
   • Navigate to Admin → Locations and create a new location
   • Navigate to Nodes and add your Wings instance

2. Email configuration (Admin → Settings):

   • Set MAIL_* variables on the Hydrodactyl service and redeploy
   • Recommended providers:
     • Resend
     • Mailgun
     • AWS SES

Maintenance

1. Updating Hydrodactyl:
   • The template is pinned to a specific image tag. To update, change the image on the Hydrodactyl service (e.g. ghcr.io/blueprintframework/hydrodactyl:v6.4.1) and redeploy.

Troubleshooting

Common issues and solutions:

• Build or deploy failures:
  • Check the deployment logs for the failing service
  • Verify the MariaDB and Redis services are running before the panel
• Panel loads but assets or links use the wrong URL:
  • Make sure APP_URL matches the public domain exactly, including https://
• "Waiting for database connection" in the logs:
  • MariaDB is still starting up; the panel retries automatically

Additional resources

• Railway Documentation
• Hydrodactyl Railway template
• Hydrodactyl GitHub
• Pterodactyl Wings Setup