Deploy and Host Architecture City with Railway

Architecture City is a browser-based 3D map of a software repository: systems become districts, files become towers, and evidence-labelled relationships become illuminated traces. This template deploys a static Caddy service that serves the viewer and a committed sample graph with no environment variables and no API keys.

About Hosting Architecture City

Hosting this template means running a single Railway service from the GitHub repository root. Railway builds the included Dockerfile, starts Caddy on the injected PORT, health-checks /health, and serves index.html plus the architecture JSON over public HTTPS. WebGL rendering happens in the visitor's browser; Railway only delivers static assets (HTML, vendored Three.js, and graph JSON). There is no database, worker, or secret panel required for a working deploy.

Common Use Cases

One-click public demo of a repository-derived architecture city
Share a read-only 3D orientation surface without publishing source file contents
Replace the sample JSON with your own safety-filtered architecture graph
Keep GitHub Pages and Railway as independent static hosts of the same viewer
Start from zero config, then iterate branding and graph fidelity later

Dependencies for Architecture City Hosting

Public GitHub source: cheffer0723/asymmetry-city (repository root)
Caddy 2 static file server (Dockerfile)
Vendored Three.js 0.179.1 (no CDN at runtime)
Sample graphs: architecture-city-summary.json (fast first paint) and architecture-map.json (full detail on demand)
A WebGL-capable desktop or mobile browser for visitors

Deployment Dependencies

Railway public HTTP networking on the service
Healthcheck path /health (returns plain ok)
No required variables — deploy with an empty variables panel
Optional later: swap the two JSON files and edit titles in index.html
GitHub Pages remains optional and independent (.github/workflows/deploy.yml)

Implementation Details

Caddy listens on Railway's $PORT, enables gzip for the large detail graph, and serves only the runtime assets copied into /srv. Vendor scripts are long-cache immutable; graph JSON stays short-cache. Missing .js paths return 404 (not index.html) so a broken vendor tree cannot blank the WebGL city with an HTML MIME type. The viewer loads the city summary first, prefetches the full map when idle, then installs architecture-map.json when a visitor chooses LOAD FULL DETAILS.

Why Deploy Architecture City 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 Architecture City 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.