Deploy and Host Ghost on Railway

Ghost is a powerful open-source publishing and newsletter platform — a self-hosted alternative to Substack, Medium, and Mailchimp. It combines a professional blog, membership site, and email newsletter system in one, giving you full ownership of your content, audience, and revenue with no per-subscriber fees. This template deploys the official Ghost image backed by a managed MySQL 8 database, wired for private networking with a persistent volume so your posts, members, and settings survive every redeploy. [Updated August '26]

About Hosting Ghost

Ghost requires MySQL in production (SQLite is not supported), plus a persistent volume for uploaded images and themes at /var/lib/ghost/content. This template provisions both automatically: a dedicated MySQL 8.4 service reachable over Railway's private network, and a volume on the Ghost service. The public URL is injected on first boot so links, admin, and outbound email all resolve correctly with zero manual configuration.

Common Use Cases

Running a paid newsletter or membership publication as a Substack alternative, keeping 100% of revenue
Hosting a professional company blog or personal writing site you fully own and control
Building a content-driven membership community with gated posts and paid tiers

Dependencies for Ghost Hosting

A MySQL 8 database (included as a managed service in this template)
A persistent volume for content, images, and themes
An SMTP provider such as Mailgun if you want to send member newsletters by email

Why Deploy Ghost on Railway?

Railway provisions the full Ghost + MySQL stack in one click with private networking, a persistent volume, and a public domain already wired up. You avoid the most common cause of failed Ghost deployments — a missing or misconfigured database and site URL — because both are set correctly out of the box. As your audience grows, scale resources up from a single dashboard without touching infrastructure.