Deploy and Host Align website on Railway

What is Align website?
Align is the public site for the ALIGN initiative. It’s a Next.js app: marketing pages, team and publications, plus password-protected training and a separate admin area to edit copy and images. Content lives on disk under DATA_DIR, not in the repo, so deploys don’t bake in your live text.

About Hosting Align website

You’re basically running a normal Next.js app: install deps, next build, next start, and set env vars on the host. The extra piece is storage: Align reads and writes JSON and team images under DATA_DIR, so production needs a writable folder that survives restarts (e.g. a Railway volume mounted at something like /data, with DATA_DIR pointing at that same path). Set the admin and training passwords and cookie secrets in the platform’s secrets UI—no need to commit them. Back up that data separately; it isn’t in git.

Common Use Cases

Ship the public site — About, team, publications, contact, SEO, without redeploying for every copy tweak if you use admin + volume.
Let editors update content — Sign in at /admin and change JSON-backed content and images.
Gate training — Put training behind /training/login with its own password and session cookies.

Dependencies for Align website Hosting

Node.js — To build and run the Next.js app.
Persistent disk (or equivalent) — A writable DATA_DIR so content and uploads aren’t lost when the container restarts.

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details (optional)

With DATA_DIR set, also set ADMIN_PAGE_PASSWORD, ADMIN_COOKIE_SECRET, TRAINING_PAGE_PASSWORD, and TRAINING_COOKIE_SECRET. Use long random values for the two cookie secrets (e.g. openssl rand -hex 32) and keep them different from each other. Point DATA_DIR at the same path as your volume mount (e.g. /data).

Why Deploy Align website 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 Align website 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.