Deploy and Host EmDash Starter on Railway

EmDash Starter is an open-source starter for building modern content-driven websites with EmDash. It gives you a ready foundation for managing content, pages, and publishing workflows while keeping the developer experience simple. It is a strong fit for blogs, docs sites, editorial projects, and custom content platforms.

About Hosting EmDash Starter

Hosting EmDash Starter on Railway gives you a straightforward way to run a production-ready EmDash app without managing your own servers. A typical deployment includes the app itself, environment variables, and persistent storage for things like a SQLite database and uploaded files. Railway handles the deployment flow, networking, and runtime management, making it easier to get a project online quickly. This template is useful for developers who want a simple starting point for launching an EmDash-powered site, testing ideas, or creating a reusable foundation for future projects.

Common Use Cases

• Launching a blog, publication, or editorial website with a clean starter setup
• Building a documentation site or knowledge base with structured content
• Creating a custom content platform or prototype that can be deployed quickly

Dependencies for EmDash Starter Hosting

• A Railway account and project
• Persistent storage for SQLite and uploaded media

Deployment Dependencies

• EmDash: https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash
• Railway: https://railway.com/

Implementation Details

Example Railway runtime configuration:

{
  "$schema": "https://railway.com/railway.schema.json",
  "build": {
    "builder": "RAILPACK",
    "buildCommand": "corepack enable && pnpm install --frozen-lockfile && pnpm build"
  },
  "deploy": {
    "startCommand": "node dist/server/entry.mjs",
    "healthcheckPath": "/",
    "healthcheckTimeout": 120,
    "restartPolicyType": "ON_FAILURE",
    "restartPolicyMaxRetries": 10
  }
}

Example environment values:

DATABASE_URL=file:/data/emdash.db
UPLOAD_DIR=/data/uploads
NODE_ENV=production

### Why Deploy 

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 EmDash Starter 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.