Railway: Excaliself docs

Deploy with one click from the Railway template, or set up the prebuilt image and a Postgres database by hand.

Deploy with the template

The template adds the app and a Postgres database, with the settings below already in place. It generates the auth secret and a domain. When the deploy finishes, open the domain to create the admin account.

Deploy by hand

In a new Railway project, add a PostgreSQL database.
Add a service from the Docker image ghcr.io/maciekzygmunt/excaliself:latest.
In the service’s Settings → Networking, generate a domain with port 3000.
In the service’s Variables, set:

Variable Value

DATABASE_URL ${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}

BETTER_AUTH_SECRET The output of openssl rand -base64 32

BASE_URL https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}

PORT 3000
Deploy, and open the domain to create the admin account.

Variable	Value
`DATABASE_URL`	`${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}`
`BETTER_AUTH_SECRET`	The output of `openssl rand -base64 32`
`BASE_URL`	`https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}`
`PORT`	`3000`

DATABASE_URL points at Postgres over Railway’s private network, so the database needs no public access. Drawings live in the database’s volume and survive redeploys. The other settings, such as single sign-on, are in Environment variables.

Upgrade or pin a version

Railway does not pull a newer image on its own, and a plain redeploy keeps the old one. To upgrade, click the update button that appears in the service’s settings, or turn on automatic updates there. To pin a version, turn automatic updates off and use a release tag in the image name, e.g. ghcr.io/maciekzygmunt/excaliself:1.2.3. Automatic updates move a release tag to newer releases.