Deploy and Host

Linkwarden — a self-hosted, collaborative bookmark manager that permanently archives every saved page as a screenshot, PDF, and single-file HTML snapshot, so your links survive link rot. Collections, tags, sharing, browser extension, mobile apps, and fast full-text search.

Deploys in one click with zero form fields. Three services come up together:

linkwarden — the Next.js web app + archiving worker (headless Chromium + monolith HTML snapshots) on /
postgres — PostgreSQL 16 on a Railway volume
meilisearch — full-text search on a Railway volume, private-network only

The database URL is composed at boot from the Postgres companion; NEXTAUTH_URL points at your Railway domain; all secrets (NEXTAUTH_SECRET, POSTGRES_PASSWORD, MEILI_MASTER_KEY) are generated. Open the domain and create your account.

About Hosting

The app honors Railway's injected PORT. The entrypoint waits for Postgres, runs prisma migrate deploy, then starts the web server and the archiving worker. Archives, the database cluster, and the search index each live on their own Railway volume. Healthcheck is GET / (200 or login redirect, unauthenticated).

Memory: app ~500 MB at rest; MAX_WORKERS=1 caps Chromium concurrency so archive bursts stay inside Hobby limits. Postgres ~100 MB, Meilisearch ~200 MB at rest.
Build: the official prebuilt images (all digest-pinned) — no source builds, deploys in minutes.

Why Deploy

Read-it-later apps rent you your own memory. Linkwarden keeps it on your hardware: every page you save is archived in three formats on your volume, full-text indexed on your Meilisearch, and searchable forever — no subscription, no link rot, no third party reading your bookmarks. The worker does real sustained work per saved link (Chromium renders screenshots/PDFs, monolith inlines a portable HTML copy), which is exactly the kind of always-on workload that belongs on your own Railway project instead of a metered cloud plan.

Common Use Cases

A personal "second brain" of web pages immune to link rot
Team research collections with per-collection permissions and public share links
RSS-fed auto-archiving of newsletters and blogs
Archiving pages ahead of a redesign, shutdown, or paywall
Full-text search across everything you have ever saved

Dependencies for

Deployment Dependencies

Three services, zero form fields, three volumes. The app needs outbound HTTPS (to archive the pages you save). Postgres and Meilisearch talk to the app over Railway's private network only — neither gets a public domain.

Configuration (all auto-filled ${{...}} expressions; optional upstream vars go in the service Variables panel):

Variable	Default	What it does
`PGHOST` / `PGPASSWORD`	`${{postgres.…}}` refs	Postgres companion credentials; composed into `DATABASE_URL` at boot
`NEXTAUTH_URL`	`https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}/api/v1/auth`	Public auth callback base URL
`NEXTAUTH_SECRET`	`${{secret(32)}}`	Session signing secret
`MEILI_HOST`	`http://${{meilisearch.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:7700`	Full-text search backend
`MEILI_MASTER_KEY`	`${{meilisearch.MEILI_MASTER_KEY}}`	Shared search API key
`STORAGE_FOLDER`	`/data/data` (baked)	Archive storage path
`MAX_WORKERS`	`1` (baked)	Concurrent Chromium archival jobs

Useful upstream options: PAGINATION_TAKE_COUNT, ARCHIVE_TAKE_COUNT, BROWSER_TIMEOUT, MAX_LINKS_PER_USER, NEXT_PUBLIC_RSS_POLLING_INTERVAL_MINUTES, TEXT_CONTENT_LIMIT, AI auto-tagging (OLLAMA_MODEL or OPENAI_API_KEY + provider variants), S3 archive storage (SPACES_*), SMTP (EMAIL_SERVER/EMAIL_FROM), outbound PROXY, ALLOW_PRIVATE_NETWORK_ACCESS, PDF margins, and 40+ SSO providers (NEXT_PUBLIC__ENABLED + credentials — GitHub, Google, Authentik, Keycloak, generic OIDC, …). Full list: https://docs.linkwarden.app/self-hosting/environment-variables