Deploy and Host HolyClaude on Railway

HolyClaude is an AI coding workstation in a single container: Claude Code with a browser UI, a headless Chromium, eight AI CLIs — Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Junie, OpenCode, Pi, TaskMaster — and around fifty development tools, supervised by s6-overlay.

This template runs it on Railway with its state on a volume and its web UI behind a password generated for your deployment. One service, one volume, a public domain. The deploy form asks for nothing.

About Hosting HolyClaude

The container runs CloudCLI, the web UI, on port 3001 behind Railway's edge, with Claude Code and the other CLIs installed alongside it and Chromium available for screenshots and browser testing. Upstream is built for Docker Compose — bind mounts, a port published only on 127.0.0.1, and a person who creates the account in the browser — so this template adapts three things and changes nothing else.

The volume mounts at /home/claude/.claude, the application's own state directory, because upstream refuses to start when that path is a symlink and a mount over /home/claude would hide the Claude Code binary the image installs. Your projects live at /workspace, which is symlinked into that volume. The account database, and with it the signing secret for your session, sits on the volume too — so a redeploy does not sign you out.

Registration is the part that needed the most care. CloudCLI is single-user: the first request to create an account wins, and every later one is refused. That is safe on a laptop and unsafe on a public URL, so the entrypoint creates the account itself — against a loopback-only instance of the server, before the public one starts — and refuses to boot if that fails.

Why Deploy HolyClaude on Railway?

It stays awake. Long agent runs, builds and tests keep going when you close the laptop.
Nothing to install. The image already has the CLIs, the browser, the language runtimes and the tools, pinned by checksum upstream.
Your own account. Claude Code runs on your existing Claude subscription or API key; nothing is proxied through a third party.
It survives redeploys. Projects, settings, memory, CLI credentials and your signed-in session are on the volume.
Reachable from anything. It is a browser UI, so a phone or a borrowed machine works.

Common Use Cases

A always-on development box for agent work that outlasts a laptop session.
Coding from a tablet or phone through the browser terminal and editor.
Browser automation and screenshot testing with a Chromium that is already configured.
Trying several AI CLIs against the same repository without installing any of them locally.

Dependencies for HolyClaude Hosting

An Anthropic account — a Claude Pro/Max subscription (sign in from the web UI) or an API key.
Optional keys for the other CLIs: GEMINI_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY, CURSOR_API_KEY. These can be added as service variables or entered in the web UI, which stores them on the volume.

Deployment Dependencies

Upstream project: (MIT), image coderluii/holyclaude:1.6.1.
Web UI: @cloudcli-ai/cloudcli (upstream siteboon/claudecodeui), AGPL-3.0-or-later, shipped unmodified.
Claude Code is Anthropic's proprietary CLI, used with your own account: .
Template source: (MIT).

Implementation Details

After deploying: copy CLOUDCLI_PASSWORD from the service's Variables tab, open the public domain, and sign in as admin. Then sign in to Anthropic from the web UI, or set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY.

Read this before deploying. Upstream advises against putting HolyClaude on the public internet at all: the web UI gives a full shell, runs arbitrary code, and holds your Anthropic credentials, and the project recommends a Tailscale or Cloudflare tunnel instead of an open port. A Railway domain is public.

This template does what can be done about that: a single-user account claimed before the server is ever exposed, registration closed afterwards (403 from the first request the public port answers), bcrypt at cost 12, a per-installation JWT secret, and a 24-character generated password that the container refuses to start without. CloudCLI has no login rate limiting, so that password is the whole door — keep the generated one, and treat the URL like an SSH session into your dev box.

There is no password-change endpoint: CLOUDCLI_PASSWORD is the initial password, and resetting it means deleting the account database from the volume. Do not set API_KEY — CloudCLI applies it to every /api request, including the browser's, which locks you out of the UI.

Notes. The image is large (~13 GB unpacked), so the first deploy takes a while and it will not fit the Free or Trial plan's 4 GB image limit. Codex's bubblewrap sandbox needs user namespaces that Railway does not grant; use Codex in its non-sandboxed modes, or Claude Code. Running terminals and agent sessions end on redeploy; files on the volume do not.