Homepage (gethomepage.dev) on Railway

The gethomepage.dev dashboard — your services, widgets, and links in one click. Deployed with authentication built in (Homepage v2), a working starter config, and a persistent config volume. No auth proxy, no database, no deploy-form questions: click deploy, open the URL, log in with the auto-generated password.

What's inside


App	Homepage `v2.4.0` (pinned), port 3000 on your Railway domain
Auth	Login gate in front of every page — anonymous visitors are redirected to sign-in. `HOMEPAGE_AUTH_ENABLED=true` is baked into the image.
Config volume	Railway volume at `/app/config` — all settings are plain YAML files that hot-reload in seconds
Starter dashboard	Greeting + clock + search widgets, 3 example service cards with live status pings, a bookmark strip

Deploy-form variables: none

Everything is generated per deploy by Railway expressions — the one-click flow asks you nothing:

Variable	Value
`HOMEPAGE_AUTH_PASSWORD`	`${{secret(24,"alnum")}}` — your login password, read it in the Variables tab
`HOMEPAGE_AUTH_SECRET`	`${{secret(32)}}` — session cookie signing key
`HOMEPAGE_EXTERNAL_URL`	`https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}`
`HOMEPAGE_ALLOWED_HOSTS`	`${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}},healthcheck.railway.app`

After deploying

Open your service's public domain → you land on the sign-in page.
Log in with HOMEPAGE_AUTH_PASSWORD (service → Variables tab, or railway variables).
Make it yours by editing the YAML files on the volume (/app/config/services.yaml, settings.yaml, bookmarks.yaml, widgets.yaml) — changes appear within seconds, no restart. railway ssh gets you a shell; the shipped files are documented worked examples.
Add real API-backed widgets (Sonarr, Proxmox, Uptime Kuma, OpenWeatherMap, …) and keep their keys out of the YAML: put them in Railway variables prefixed HOMEPAGE_VAR_ (e.g. HOMEPAGE_VAR_WEATHER_KEY) and reference {{HOMEPAGE_VAR_WEATHER_KEY}} in the config. Never commit keys to config files again.

Railway note: there is no Docker socket on Railway, so Docker/container widgets don't apply — use the ~100 HTTP/API-based service widgets, or plain siteMonitor status pings like the starter config does.

Cost: roughly $3–5/month — one small service plus the config volume.

Deploy and Host

About Hosting

This template provisions one Railway service from the pinned upstream image (ghcr.io/gethomepage/homepage:v2.4.0) with a volume mounted at /app/config. Homepage is configured entirely by YAML files on that volume — there is no database and no state outside it. On first boot a wrapper copies the starter config (settings, services, bookmarks, widgets) into the empty volume exactly once; your later edits are never overwritten by redeploys. Railway probes /api/healthcheck, Homepage's own health endpoint, which bypasses the auth gate so the healthcheck never fails on authentication. Restart or redeploy the service and your dashboard config persists on the volume.

Why Deploy

Manual Homepage setups historically required an auth proxy (oauth/forward-auth) in front of the dashboard, because upstream had no login page before v2.0. This template ships Homepage v2 with its built-in credential gate enabled (HOMEPAGE_AUTH_ENABLED=true baked into the image), a per-deploy generated password and cookie secret, and HOMEPAGE_ALLOWED_HOSTS pinned to your Railway domain for host-header protection. You also get a seeded, working dashboard instead of empty config files, and volume-backed persistence that survives restarts — none of which you'd have from a bare container run.

Common Use Cases

A single authenticated start page for your homelab, SaaS, or internal tools — every service one click away with live status dots.
A status/overview wall for Railway-hosted projects: point service cards at your other Railway apps and monitor them with siteMonitor.
A team portal with bookmarks and widgets (clock, greeting, search, weather via HOMEPAGE_VAR_* keys).
A starting point to learn gethomepage's config model safely — every file on the volume is a documented example you can edit live.

Dependencies for

Homepage itself is a self-contained Node.js app — no external services are provisioned.

Deployment Dependencies

None at deploy time. The template needs no user-supplied credentials: auth is generated per deploy, and the starter widgets (datetime, greeting, search, status pings) are API-key-free.
Optional, post-deploy: API keys only if you add key-based widgets (e.g. HOMEPAGE_VAR_OPENWEATHERMAP_KEY as a Railway variable, referenced as {{HOMEPAGE_VAR_OPENWEATHERMAP_KEY}} in config).
If you attach a custom domain, append it to HOMEPAGE_ALLOWED_HOSTS (comma-separated, no spaces) and update HOMEPAGE_EXTERNAL_URL to keep login working.