Deploy and Host TREK on Railway

TREK is a self-hosted collaborative travel planner with interactive maps, itineraries, budgets, packing lists, reservations, documents, journals, offline PWA support, OIDC, passkeys, plugins, and optional AI-assisted booking import. This Railway template runs TREK as a single service with durable SQLite and upload storage.

About Hosting TREK

TREK serves its web client, API, and WebSocket endpoint from port 3000. Its SQLite database, encryption state, logs, plugins, backups, and uploaded files must survive redeployments. Railway supports one volume per service, so this template's container links /app/uploads into /app/data/uploads and mounts one persistent volume at /app/data.

The template generates an encryption key and initial administrator password, configures Railway's HTTPS origin, trusts one proxy hop, and checks /api/health before accepting a deployment.

Common Use Cases

Plan trips collaboratively with live updates
Track budgets, reservations, packing lists, and documents
Maintain a travel journal and visited-country atlas
Run a private PWA with passkeys or OIDC single sign-on
Extend trip planning with TREK plugins and MCP tools

Dependencies for TREK Hosting

TREK 3.4.1
Node.js 24 runtime
SQLite through better-sqlite3
Persistent Railway volume at /app/data
HTTPS and WebSocket routing on port 3000

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

The service uses APP_URL and ALLOWED_ORIGINS from its Railway public domain, FORCE_HTTPS=true, and TRUST_PROXY=1. ENCRYPTION_KEY, ADMIN_PASSWORD, and the persistent volume are generated during template deployment. The administrator credentials are used only to initialize an empty installation.

Uploaded files are stored under /app/data/uploads; the application still sees its upstream path at /app/uploads through a container symlink. This is required because Railway currently permits one mounted volume per service.

The template pins ghcr.io/monotykamary/nomad:3.4.1. Future template revisions can advance that tag after validation; database and upload contents remain on the volume during redeployments.

Why Deploy TREK on Railway?

Railway provides HTTPS, WebSocket routing, persistent volumes, health checks, deployment logs, backups, and restart management without requiring a separate database service. TREK remains self-hosted while Railway handles the underlying application runtime.