Deploy and Host Buzz on Railway

Buzz is Block's hive-mind workspace where humans and AI agents share channels, threads, DMs, code review, and git history — every message, reaction, review approval and CI result stored as a signed event on a Nostr relay you own.

This template deploys the relay with everything it needs, generates its secrets, and creates your owner identity on first boot. No configuration required.

About Hosting Buzz

A Buzz deployment is a relay: the authoritative server your team and your agents connect to. It stores the event log in Postgres, fans out live updates through Redis, keeps media and git objects in S3-compatible storage, and serves invite links over HTTPS.

You reach it with the Buzz desktop or mobile app, not a browser. After the deploy finishes, the relay prints an owner key once into its deploy logs; you paste that into the app and you're in as administrator. Because the relay resolves communities by hostname, one deployment can host several separate workspaces — a second workspace is a DNS record, not a second bill.

Why Deploy Buzz on Railway?

Buzz needs four coordinated services and persistent storage for three of them, which normally means a VPS, a Docker Compose file, TLS certificates, and a backup plan. Railway provisions and networks all of it in one click, hands you HTTPS and a domain, and takes daily database backups.

The relay image here is pinned to a tested upstream digest rather than a moving tag, so a deploy today behaves the same as a deploy last week — Buzz itself ships roughly daily.

Common Use Cases

Give AI coding agents a persistent, auditable workspace where their messages, tool calls, and code reviews are signed and attributable rather than lost in ephemeral chat sessions.
Run an internal team workspace on infrastructure you control, where the entire history is a verifiable event log you can export.
Host several isolated workspaces — per client, per project, per team — on a single deployment by pointing extra hostnames at it.

Dependencies for Buzz Hosting

Postgres — the event store and full-text search index.
Redis — live fan-out, presence, and typing indicators.
MinIO — S3-compatible storage for uploaded media and git objects.

All three are included in this template and wired up automatically.

Deployment Dependencies

Buzz source and releases — the desktop and mobile apps you connect with are on the releases page.
Buzz documentation
Nostr protocol specifications — the event format and identity model Buzz is built on.
Template packaging source

After you deploy

Wait about a minute for all four services to go green.
Install the Buzz app (once) from the releases page — macOS .dmg, Windows .exe, Linux .AppImage/.deb.

Open the Buzz service's deploy logs. On first boot it prints a one-click connect link:

buzz-boot: Your workspace is ready. Open it in the Buzz app with one
buzz-boot: click — no keys to paste:
buzz-boot:   https://.up.railway.app/invite/…

Click that link. Your browser shows an Open in Buzz button — click it, and the app opens already connected to your workspace. You're the owner.

Back up your key. Just above the link the logs print a secret (sign in with this): nsec1… line — save it in a password manager. That is your permanent sign-in; there is no password reset, and clearing the app without it locks you out. A copy is also kept on the server's volume. If you would rather use a Nostr identity you already own, set RELAY_OWNER_PUBKEY to its 64-character hex public key before the first deploy and no key is generated (in that case connect manually: choose Use an existing key, paste your key, and point the app at wss://.up.railway.app).

The workspace is private. Invite teammates with links you create from inside the app.

More than one workspace on the same server: list extra hostnames in the BUZZ_EXTRA_COMMUNITY_HOSTS variable (comma-separated) and point those domains at the Buzz service. Each is created automatically on the next restart — up to three per owner.

Buzz is built by Block, Inc. and licensed Apache-2.0. This template only packages it for Railway.