Deploy and Host Flame on Railway

Flame is a self-hosted startpage and application dashboard for your server. It lets you organize bookmarks, apps, and services into a clean, customizable homepage with built-in editors — no file editing required. It includes a weather widget, search bar, and Docker container auto-detection.

About Hosting Flame

Flame is a lightweight Node.js application that uses SQLite as its database, making it a single-container deployment with zero external dependencies. Once deployed, you can immediately start adding applications and bookmarks through the built-in web editor. The interface supports custom CSS themes, configurable search engines, and keyboard shortcuts for fast navigation.

Admin password is configured from the enviroment variable PASSWORD. All data is stored in a persistent volume mounted at /app/data, so your configuration survives restarts and redeployments. The template automatically generates a public URL for your Flame instance.

Common Use Cases

• Homelab Dashboard — Organize links to all your self-hosted services (media servers, NAS, routers, monitoring tools) in one centralized homepage
• Team Startpage — Provide your team with a curated landing page of frequently used internal tools, documentation, and cloud services
• Personal Productivity Hub — Replace your browser's new tab page with a fast, self-hosted startpage featuring quick search and categorized bookmarks

Dependencies for Flame Hosting

• Docker image: pawelmalak/flame (official image from GitHub)
• Persistent storage: A volume mounted at /app/data for SQLite database and configuration

Deployment Dependencies

• Flame GitHub Repository — Source code and documentation
• Weather API — Optional, for the weather widget (free plan: 1M calls/month)
• latlong.net — Optional, to get latitude/longitude coordinates for weather

Post-Deployment Setup: Enabling the Weather Widget

The weather widget is disabled by default. To enable it:

1. Get a free API key from Weather API — the free plan allows 1M calls/month (Flame uses less than 3K/month).
2. Get your coordinates from latlong.net — search your city to get the latitude and longitude values.
3. Configure in Flame: Open your deployed Flame instance → go to Settings → enter your API key, latitude, and longitude → click Save. The weather widget will now appear on your homepage.

Why Deploy Flame 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 Flame 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.