Deploy and Host Aphex CMS on Railway

Aphex CMS is an open-source, developer-first content management system built on SvelteKit. Unlike headless CMSes, it is embedded: the same app that serves your website also runs the editing studio, so there is no separate backend to deploy and no content API to wire up. This template deploys a complete, editable website — a block-based page builder, a blog, full-text search and visual editing — backed by PostgreSQL and S3-compatible object storage.

About Hosting Aphex CMS

Hosting Aphex means running one SvelteKit container alongside a PostgreSQL database and an object store for uploaded media. The app serves the public site, the /admin studio, a REST and GraphQL API, and an MCP endpoint from the same process.

It needs three things to work correctly, and this template arranges all of them: a database it can migrate on boot, a bucket for media that survives redeploys, and a public URL it can derive its own origin from. Migrations run automatically at container start. The background job queue — scheduled publishing, event consumers — runs in-process, so no separate worker service or cron is required at a single replica. Session secrets and the plugin-secret encryption key are generated once at deploy and must then stay stable for the life of the instance.

Uploaded media is never served from the bucket directly. Every asset is addressed through the app at /media/:id/:filename, which is what lets private files stay private and resized variants be generated on demand and cached permanently.

Why Deploy Aphex CMS 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 Aphex CMS 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.

Specifically for Aphex, Railway removes the two setup steps that normally stand between you and a working CMS. The Postgres service and the Bucket service are provisioned and wired to the app automatically, so there are no required fields on this template — no database URL to paste, no S3 account to create, no access keys to generate. Railway also supplies the public domain, which the container reads at startup to derive its own auth origin, so sign-in works on the first boot without you configuring a URL.

Common Use Cases

Marketing and company websites — a block-based page builder with reusable layout blocks and four hero treatments, editable by non-developers without touching code.
Blogs and publications — dated articles with rich text, inline media and code blocks, categories, related posts, a paginated archive and full-text search.
Client sites built by agencies — define the content model in TypeScript, hand over a studio with roles, invitations and per-field access control, and let the client edit visually on the live page.
Content backends for teams already using SvelteKit — a typed Local API for server code, plus REST, GraphQL and an MCP server so AI agents can read and write content.

Dependencies for Aphex CMS Hosting

PostgreSQL — content, users, sessions and the job queue.
S3-compatible object storage — uploaded media.

Deployment Dependencies

Aphex CMS documentation
Railway deployment guide
Source repository
Resend — optional, required for password reset, email verification and team invitations.

Implementation Details

First steps after deploying

Go to /login and create your account immediately. The first account to sign up becomes super admin. On a public URL that is a race, so either set APHEX_BOOTSTRAP_EMAIL before deploying or claim the instance as soon as it is live.
Open /admin. Your organization and roles are created for you on first sign-in.
Example content — real articles, images and navigation — is created on the first boot, so every block and page has something in it. Set APHEX_SEED=false to start empty.
Edit Site Settings, Header and Footer to make it yours.

Optional environment variables

Variable	Effect
`APHEX_BOOTSTRAP_EMAIL`	Restricts the super-admin claim to one address.
`RESEND_API_KEY`, `APHEX_EMAIL_FROM`	Enables password reset, email verification and invitations.
`AUTH_REQUIRE_EMAIL_VERIFICATION`	Requires a verified email to sign in. Only turn this on after email works, or the first sign-up cannot complete.
`APHEX_SEED`	Set `false` to skip the example content.

Things that will bite you

Keep every service in the same region. Railway sets the region per service. If the app and Postgres end up in different regions, every page render waits on cross-region round trips and the site becomes dramatically slower — with no error anywhere.
AUTH_SECRET and APHEX_SECRET_ENCRYPTION_KEY must stay stable. Rotating the first signs everyone out and invalidates every API key; rotating the second makes stored plugin secrets permanently unreadable.
Without email configured, a lost password is unrecoverable. The account you sign up with is the only way in.
Scaling past one replica requires turning off APHEX_EMBEDDED_WORKER and driving POST /api/internal/workers/run from a cron service with APHEX_WORKER_SECRET set. Turning it off without a replacement leaves nothing processing the queue: scheduled publishes are accepted, report success, and never happen.

Prefer to build locally? pnpm create aphex scaffolds the same template on your machine, using SQLite with no infrastructure to run.