Deploy and Host Agentlings on Railway

Agentlings is a horde of small agentlings that march through a side-view 2D world, pick up real coding and desk jobs, work them in per-job sandboxes, and deliver results for you to review. Nothing they produce reaches the real world until you promote it.

About Hosting Agentlings

Deploying gives you an install of your own: one secrets file, one data directory, one ledger, jobs running as you. There is no multi-tenancy — nobody runs anything for you, and the maintainer cannot see your install.

One service, one volume at /data. Your secrets, ledger, levels, schedules and job records live there and nowhere else, which is why a key you paste on Monday still works after a rebuild on Tuesday. Lose the volume and you lose all of it.

AGENTLINGS_PASSWORD is the only variable the template asks for. Anyone with it and your URL is you, so make it long — without it the server refuses to start rather than put an ungated horde on a public address. To have your install do real work you will also set a model credential, either ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or a long-lived CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN from claude setup-token; a fresh claude login does not exist in a container. Every other key — Telegram, GitHub, Brave search, Google, any MCP server you add — is entered inside the app, checked with one real call before it is stored, and lands in your secrets file on the volume.

Why Deploy Agentlings on Railway?

Railway gives the install the two things it actually needs: a persistent volume, which is where the whole trust story lives, and a public address with a password in front of it. A redeploy is a restart rather than a wipe.

Common Use Cases

A research desk that fetches and searches, then writes real .docx, .xlsx and printable PDFs.
Scheduled reports and mail triggers — a Monday summary, a rule that fires on a Gmail query — where every send waits for your approval.
Reconciling statements, composing a reviewed transfer batch, and other desk work you want done and checked rather than done and trusted.

Anything needing your own disk or desktop is refused at its probe and shown as refused, with the reason, rather than silently missing: repo work from a local path, the folder organizer, OCR, the knowledge store over folders, and supervised live acting.

Dependencies for Agentlings

Node 20.19 or newer, built from the repository's own Dockerfile on Playwright's base image so the browser door and PDF rendering work. No database and no cache — an install keeps everything as files on its volume.

Deployment Dependencies

A volume mounted at /data, created by this template.
AGENTLINGS_PASSWORD, which you choose at deploy time.
A model credential (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN) before the horde can do paid work. Source: https://github.com/briant92/Agentlings (Apache-2.0). It runs shell commands with your credentials, so it is worth reading before you trust it.