Deploy and Host Hono + WebDecoy Bot Detection on Railway

A Hono app on Node with WebDecoy bot detection already wired in. WebDecoy records the scrapers, AI crawlers, and automated tools hitting your routes, flags crawlers that fake their identity, and plants a hidden honeytoken link that only bots follow. Deploy it as a starting point, or copy the middleware in server.js into your own app.

About Hosting Hono + WebDecoy Bot Detection

The template is a single Node.js service (@hono/node-server) built from a public GitHub repo, with a /health route for Railway's healthcheck. It needs one variable: WEBDECOY_API_KEY, which you create for free at app.webdecoy.com under Settings, API Keys. The middleware starts in monitor mode, so detections are recorded and every request is still served; the verdict is on c.get('webdecoy'). Railway's X-Forwarded-For holds the client address followed by its own edge address, so the middleware trusts two hops rather than one. Without a key the app still runs, with local rules only.

Common Use Cases

See which AI crawlers and scrapers are calling your API, and which ones are forging a known crawler's user agent
Catch scrapers with a hidden honeytoken link injected into your HTML responses
Start in monitor mode, then switch to enforce and return a 403 (or a 429 for a rate limit) to automated traffic once you trust what it flags

Dependencies for Hono + WebDecoy Bot Detection Hosting

A free WebDecoy account and API key (app.webdecoy.com)
Node.js 20 or later (Railway's builder provides it)

Implementation Details

import { webdecoy } from '@webdecoy/hono';

app.use('*', webdecoy({
  apiKey: process.env.WEBDECOY_API_KEY,
  trustProxy: 2, // Railway: client, then Railway's edge
  skipPaths: ['/health'],
}));

Prove it reports: curl -A "WebDecoy-Test/1.0" https://YOUR-APP.up.railway.app/ fires a detection labeled Test in your WebDecoy dashboard, excluded from stats and billing.

Why Deploy Hono + WebDecoy Bot Detection 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 Hono + WebDecoy Bot Detection 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.