Deploy and Host Haven on Railway

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Haven is a free, open-source, self-hosted alternative to Discord for private messaging and community chat. Deploy your own chat server on Railway to communicate with friends, teams, and online communities, with persistent storage and daily backups to help protect your data.

About Hosting Haven

Deploy Haven on Railway to run your own chat server with a public URL. Haven supports text messaging, voice chat, screen sharing, file sharing, channels, direct messages, and community features.

This template includes persistent storage mounted at /data to retain application data across restarts and redeployments, along with daily backups for additional data protection. Railway handles HTTPS, so you can access your instance through its auto-generated domain. The web server listens on port 3000. After deployment, register your account to get started. The first user to register becomes the administrator, so complete your initial registration before inviting others.

Common Use Cases

Private Discord alternative: Host a chat server for friends, gaming groups, or online communities.
Team communication: Create a shared space for teams and projects with channels, direct messages, and voice chat.
Privacy-focused messaging: Run your own chat infrastructure with persistent data and daily backups.

Dependencies for Haven Hosting

Haven — Open-source, self-hosted chat server.
Railway — Application hosting, persistent storage, public HTTPS access, and daily backup infrastructure.

Implementation Details

HTTP proxy port: 3000
Persistent volume: /data
Daily backups: Configured for the template to help protect application data.
HTTPS: Handled by Railway; FORCE_HTTP=true disables Haven's built-in SSL.
Initial administrator: The first registered user becomes the admin.
Access: Open the auto-generated Railway domain from your service's Networking settings.

Why Deploy Haven 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 Haven 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.