Deploy and Host DBX on Railway

DBX is a database client for 100+ databases, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, SQLite, DuckDB and SQL Server, with a SQL editor, table browser, AI assistant and an MCP server. This template runs its web version, pinned to 0.6.26.

About Hosting DBX

Put DBX in the same Railway project as your databases and it reaches them over the private network, so you browse and query them from the browser without opening a public TCP proxy on the database.

The login password is set before anyone can see the page. DBX Web asks the first visitor to choose a password unless DBX_PASSWORD is set; here it's generated at deploy and applied on every start, and the first-run setup call is refused. Five wrong passwords in a row lock the login for about a minute.

DBX's own MCP endpoint is on at DBX_MCP_URL, behind a generated bearer token (DBX_WEB_MCP_TOKEN), so Claude Code, Cursor or another MCP client can list tables and run queries through the connections you saved. Only your Railway domain is accepted as the host; add a custom domain to DBX_WEB_MCP_ALLOWED_HOSTS if you use one. Remove the token variable to turn MCP off.

Connections, their encrypted passwords and the key that encrypts them are stored in /app/data, which is a volume here, so they survive redeploys.

Before publishing I tested it on Railway with a Postgres in the same project. Without the password the API answered 401, a stranger's first-run setup got 403 and a wrong password 401. Signed in, I saved a connection to postgres.railway.internal, created a table, wrote a row and read it back. Over MCP, a request without the token got 401; with it, DBX listed 23 tools and dbx_execute_query returned the same row through the saved connection. After a restart I signed in again, the connection was still there and both the web API and MCP read the row, which means the stored credentials and their key survived.

Idle, DBX used 0.01 GB of RAM (0.07 GB at most during the test).

Common Use Cases

Browse and query the Postgres, MySQL, Redis or MongoDB in your Railway project from the browser
Let Claude Code or another MCP client query your databases through one endpoint with one token
Give a teammate a database UI without sharing public database URLs

Dependencies for DBX Hosting

A database to connect to. Deploy DBX into the project that has your database; use the database service's private host (for example postgres.railway.internal), port and credentials from its Variables tab.

Deployment Dependencies

DBX: https://github.com/t8y2/dbx
Image: t8y2/dbx:0.6.26
DBX docs (web API and MCP): https://dbxio.com

Implementation Details

DBX_URL                  # open this and sign in with DBX_PASSWORD
DBX_MCP_URL              # MCP endpoint
claude mcp add --transport http dbx "$DBX_MCP_URL" --header "Authorization: Bearer $DBX_WEB_MCP_TOKEN"

Anyone with DBX_PASSWORD or the MCP token can run queries with the credentials of every connection you save. Use a read-only database user for connections that don't need writes. Sessions live in memory, so you sign in again after a restart.

Why Deploy DBX on Railway?

Your databases on Railway are private by default. DBX on the same private network gives you a GUI and an MCP endpoint for them without exposing the databases themselves, for the cost of a very small service.