Deploy and Host Karakeep on Railway

Karakeep (formerly Hoarder) is an open-source, self-hostable "bookmark everything" app. Save links, notes, images and PDFs from the web app, browser extension or mobile apps; a headless Chrome crawls and archives each page, Meilisearch makes the whole collection full-text searchable, and an optional LLM tags and summarizes everything automatically.

About Hosting Karakeep

Hosting Karakeep means running three containers together: the Karakeep app (Next.js web app, background workers and a SQLite database on one persistent directory), Meilisearch for search, and a headless Chrome for crawling. This template uses the official images pinned to the current release (ghcr.io/karakeep-app/karakeep:0.33.2, getmeili/meilisearch:v1.41.0, ghcr.io/karakeep-app/karakeep-chrome:151.0.7922.47-r1), attaches a volume to Karakeep at /data and to Meilisearch at /meili_data, generates NEXTAUTH_SECRET and the Meilisearch master key, and wires the services together over Railway's private network. Meilisearch binds [::]:7700 and the Chrome service exposes its DevTools port through a dual-stack listener so both are reachable over IPv6.

Common Use Cases

Personal read-it-later and bookmark archive: a Pocket or Omnivore replacement you own, with page archives that survive link rot
Research and knowledge base: save articles, PDFs and notes, then search full text or by AI-generated tags
Team link library: multiple users, lists, RSS feeds and a REST API, CLI and MCP server for integrations
AI-assisted curation: auto tagging, summaries and semantic search with OpenAI or a local Ollama model

Dependencies for Karakeep Hosting

Meilisearch: full-text search (included, private-only, persistent volume)
Headless Chrome: page crawling, screenshots, archives (included, private-only)
OpenAI API key or Ollama: optional, only for AI tagging, summaries and semantic search

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Karakeep keeps its database and assets under DATA_DIR=/data, so that path is the only volume the app needs. The app listens on PORT=3000 with HOSTNAME=0.0.0.0, and Railway's healthcheck hits /api/health. Key variables:

NEXTAUTH_URL=https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}
NEXTAUTH_SECRET=${{secret(48)}}
DATA_DIR=/data
MEILI_ADDR=http://${{Meilisearch.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:${{Meilisearch.PORT}}
MEILI_MASTER_KEY=${{Meilisearch.MEILI_MASTER_KEY}}
BROWSER_WEB_URL=http://${{Chrome.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:${{Chrome.PORT}}
DISABLE_SIGNUPS=false

First steps after deploy: open the generated domain, sign up (the first account becomes admin), then set DISABLE_SIGNUPS=true to close registration. Add OPENAI_API_KEY or OLLAMA_BASE_URL on the Karakeep service to enable AI features, and install the browser extension or mobile app pointed at your domain.

Why Deploy Karakeep 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 Karakeep on Railway, you get the full three-service stack from the official compose file with generated secrets, persistent volumes, health checks, managed SSL and private networking, ready to use in a few minutes.