Deploy and Host

KitchenOwl is a self-hosted household organizer for groceries, recipes, meal plans, and shared expenses. One-click deploy creates a single service with a persistent volume — no database companion needed. After deploy, open the public URL and complete onboarding to create the owner account (username + password, no email required). Public registration stays closed after that.

About Hosting

Hosting KitchenOwl on Railway keeps your household's lists, recipes, and expenses on your own volume instead of a third-party cloud. The deployment is a single always-on Python service with SQLite: the wrapper maps Railway's injected PORT onto the app's web socket, the volume at /data holds the database and uploads, and the only deploy-form field is a generated session secret.

Why Deploy

Shared shopping lists the whole household edits in real time, with suggestions based on what you usually buy.
Recipes with ingredient parsing plus a meal planner that feeds the shopping list.
Shared expense tracking in the same app as the groceries.
Self-hosted data: lists, recipes, and expenses live on your Railway volume.

Common Use Cases

A family sharing one grocery list across phones and browsers.
Meal planning for the week, with the planner generating the shopping list.
Tracking shared household expenses alongside the groceries they came from.
Keeping a household recipe collection with web-imported recipes.

Dependencies for

A single KitchenOwl service (Python backend + Flutter web client, SQLite on the volume).
One persistent volume mounted at /data (database + uploads).
Environment variables (condensed reference — full documentation in the repo README):

Variable	Default	Description
`JWT_SECRET_KEY`	generated	Session-token signing secret; the only deploy-form field.
`STORAGE_PATH`	`/data`	Volume path (SQLite at `/data/database.db`, uploads at `/data/upload`).
`DB_DRIVER`	`sqlite`	SQLite backend; no companion database needed.
`OPEN_REGISTRATION`	`false`	Public signup closed after first-owner onboarding.
`EMAIL_MANDATORY`	`false`	Onboarding is username-only; no email verification.
`COLLECT_METRICS`	`false`	Prometheus metrics endpoint disabled.
`SMTP_*`	unset	Optional SMTP for password resets; not required.
`OIDC_*`	unset	Optional OpenID Connect login; username/password is the default.

Deployment Dependencies

Plan tier: works on Railway's entry tiers; a single always-on service with a 5 GB volume.
RAM needs: modest — one Python service with SQLite; no companion database or cache service.