Deploy and Host Halo on Railway

Halo is an open-source website builder and blogging platform written in Java. It offers a rich editor, themes, plugins, pages, comments, attachments, search and a plugin store, and is used for personal blogs, documentation sites and small company websites. It is one of the most popular open-source CMS projects on GitHub.

About Hosting Halo

This template runs the official halohub/halo:2.26.1 image with a Railway Postgres database. Halo normally shows a setup page to whoever opens the site first; here the start command completes setup on first boot with the site title, admin username, email and a generated password from Railway variables, so the setup page is never exposed. Themes, plugins and uploaded attachments live on a Railway volume at /root/.halo2, and content lives in Postgres, so both survive redeploys. The JVM is capped at 512 MB heap, so it fits the Hobby plan; raise JVM_OPTS for busy sites. The login form encrypts passwords in the browser.

Common Use Cases

A personal or team blog with themes and comments
A small company website with pages and a CMS
Documentation or knowledge sites managed from a web editor

Dependencies for Halo Hosting

halohub/halo:2.26.1 (official image)
Railway Postgres
A Railway volume at /root/.halo2

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Service	Source	Networking	Storage
halo	`halohub/halo:2.26.1`	public domain on 8090	volume at `/root/.halo2`
Postgres	Railway Postgres	private	Railway volume

Variable	Default	Purpose
`HALO_ADMIN_USER`	`admin`	Admin username created on first boot
`HALO_ADMIN_PASSWORD`	generated	Its password
`HALO_ADMIN_EMAIL`	`admin@example.com`	Admin email
`HALO_SITE_TITLE`	`My Halo Site`	Site title
`HALO_EXTERNAL_URL`	`https://`	Public URL
`JVM_OPTS`	`-Xmx512m -Xms256m`	JVM memory

Notes:

Sign in at https:///console.
The setup call only runs while Halo is uninitialized; later changes to the admin variables have no effect.

This is a community-maintained deployment package and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by the Halo project.

Why Deploy Halo 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 Halo 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.