Deploy and Host Hermes Agent — Newsroom & Journalism Starter on Railway

Hermes Agent Newsroom Starter is a self-hosted AI research assistant tailored for journalists, reporters, and newsrooms. It connects to Discord, runs inference via Baseten, and comes pre-loaded with curated skills for government records research, style guide enforcement, unslop editing, and draft publication.

About Hosting Hermes Agent — Newsroom & Journalism Starter

Deploying this starter launches an isolated, private Hermes Agent container that communicates through your own Discord bot. A persistent volume mounted at /opt/data stores your newsroom coverage settings, session memory, source audits, and draft keys across restarts.

The setup fails closed by default. Hermes only listens in specific Discord channels you approve, never requires server admin privileges, and handles on-demand records lookups without background scraping loops. You own the Railway project, model provider credentials, and data volume directly.

Common Use Cases

Investigating municipal and state government records, agendas, minutes, and public meeting transcripts with required source citations.
Enforcing editorial style rules (AP, Canadian Press, Reuters, or house guidelines) and stripping AI tells with the unslop editor before drafting copy.
Generating private, signed web preview links for editors or publishing approved snapshots to team workspaces.
Sanitizing and packaging custom public records scrapers to share with other newsrooms.

Dependencies for Hermes Agent — Newsroom & Journalism Starter Hosting

Baseten API Key: Required for LLM inference through Baseten's OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
Discord Bot Token: Required for the gateway chat interface, with Message Content Intent enabled.
Discord Channel ID: Required channel allowlist to control where the bot can read and respond.
Persistent Volume: A Railway volume mounted at /opt/data to preserve state, memory, and settings.

Implementation Details

The container extends nousresearch/hermes-agent and runs in Discord gateway mode. Required configuration variables are passed directly into the environment:

BASETEN_API_KEY: Model provider credential used via key_env.
DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN: Bot credential from the Discord Developer Portal.
DISCORD_ALLOWED_CHANNELS: Comma-separated channel IDs. DMs fail closed by default.
Optional web draft viewer runs on port 8080 with HMAC-signed token validation.

Why Deploy Hermes Agent — Newsroom & Journalism Starter 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 Hermes Agent — Newsroom & Journalism Starter 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.