Deploy and Host Notal with Railway

What is Notal? Notal is a self-hosted editor for teams that already live in git. People and agents work in the same folder — Markdown plans become a claimable queue with receipts, chats live as files, and boards (*.todo) stay mergeable. Give it one folder, not your whole repo. Files agents can actually run.

About Hosting Notal

Notal runs as one container with a persistent volume at /config. Nothing is baked into the image: on first boot you open /config, set a password, clone a repository, and define workspaces. Railway handles the public URL, HTTPS, and restarts; you keep git, attribution, and your own build pipeline. Mount /config so deploy keys, workspace registry, and OAuth secrets survive redeploys.

Common Use Cases

Run a campaign or ops plan as Markdown that humans and agents claim with receipts
Give a team a folder-scoped editor with chats beside the document (not a separate assistant panel)
Expose a workspace over MCP so Cursor, Claude Code, or other clients work the same files
Clone Gallery kits (campaign, content, ops) into an empty tree and start from a runnable plan
Keep documents, chats, kits, and agent memory in git so the repo is the database

Dependencies for Notal Hosting

Public image: ghcr.io/okvic77/notal:latest
Persistent volume mounted at /config
EDITOR_CONFIG_PASSWORD (required for /config)
Outbound git access to clone your repos (deploy key generated in /config)
Optional: LLM provider keys and EDITOR_OAUTH / EDITOR_OAUTH_SECRET if you expose MCP

Deployment Dependencies

Docs: https://notal.io/docs/start/install/
Product: https://notal.io
Image: https://github.com/okvic77/notal-web (site) · ghcr.io/okvic77/notal

Why Deploy Notal 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 Notal 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.