Deploy and Host GitHub Stars Manager on Railway

GitHub Stars Manager is an open-source, AI-powered manager for your GitHub stars: semantic search across everything you've starred, automatic categorization, and release tracking — with a web UI and MCP endpoints. This template deploys it as a single self-hosted service protected by a generated API secret. It is a community-maintained template and is not affiliated with the GitHub Stars Manager project.

About Hosting GitHub Stars Manager

GitHub Stars Manager is a single Node/Express process that serves its web UI, its REST API and its MCP endpoints, storing everything in SQLite on disk. It is single-user and protects its API with a Bearer secret — but if that secret is not configured, it runs with authentication disabled, which on a public URL would let anyone read and change your data. It also encrypts the tokens you store (your GitHub token and AI provider keys) with a key you provide.

This template runs GitHub Stars Manager on Railway with a generated API secret (so the API is always protected), a generated encryption key (so stored tokens are encrypted at rest), the SQLite database persisted on a volume, and the port and health check wired. It runs the official image unmodified, pinned by digest.

Common Use Cases

Making sense of hundreds or thousands of GitHub stars with AI semantic search and auto-categorization.
Tracking new releases of the repositories you've starred.
Exposing your starred-repo knowledge to an AI assistant over MCP, behind your own secret.

Dependencies for GitHub Stars Manager Hosting

Nothing external — the database is embedded (SQLite on the volume).
To use the AI features and import your stars you provide your own GitHub token and an AI provider key, entered in the app.

Deployment Dependencies

GitHub Stars Manager: https://github.com/AmintaCCCP/GithubStarsManager (MIT)
Template repository and tests: https://github.com/youssefsiam38/github-stars-manager-railway

Implementation Details

The app runs upstream's official full-stack image (one process serves the SPA, API and MCP endpoints), pinned by digest and unmodified. The template generates API_SECRET and sets it so the API is always behind Bearer auth (every /api/* route except /api/health, plus /health, is the only open path), generates ENCRYPTION_KEY (a 64-hex-character AES-256 key) to encrypt stored tokens, sets RAILWAY_RUN_UID=0 so the non-root image can write its /app/data volume, and wires PORT, the public domain and the /health check.

Tested in CI and on a live deployment of this template: the app is healthy, the SPA is served, the API rejects a request with no secret or a wrong secret and accepts the correct one, and a setting written through the API survives a redeploy.

After deploying, copy API_SECRET from the service's variables, open the app, and paste it when asked for the backend secret. Then add your GitHub token and an AI provider in the app to import and search your stars.

Why Deploy GitHub Stars Manager 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 GitHub Stars Manager 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.