Deploy and Host Campfire on Railway

Campfire is a simple web-based group chat from Basecamp: multiple rooms with access controls, direct messages, file attachments with previews, search, mentions and a bot API.

About Hosting Campfire

This template runs the official ghcr.io/basecamp/once-campfire:latest image, which bundles the web app, background jobs and cache in one container, with a persistent volume at /rails/storage for the SQLite database and uploads. Open the public URL right after the deploy and complete the first-run wizard to create the admin account; the email you enter is shown on the sign-in page. Web push notifications are not configured in this template.

Common Use Cases

Private team or community chat without a subscription
Rooms with controlled membership, plus direct messages
Bot integrations through the built-in API

Dependencies for Campfire Hosting

One service with a volume; no external database

Deployment Dependencies

Why Deploy Campfire on Railway?

Railway gives you a public HTTPS URL, a persistent volume and automatic restarts with no server to maintain. Create the admin account as soon as the deploy finishes, since the first visitor becomes the admin.