Deploy and Host Ocular on Railway

About Hosting

Ocular is a self-hosted, open-source personal budgeting app with a beautiful, minimalist interface. It features income/expense tracking, Sankey diagram visualizations, multi-year overviews, multi-user support, PWA installability, dark/light mode, and multi-language support.

Ocular runs as a single Docker container bundling a Vue 3 SPA frontend (served by Caddy) and a Go backend (Genesis) for authentication and file-based data persistence. No external database is required — all data is stored on a persistent volume.

Why Deploy

• Privacy-first — Your financial data stays on your own infrastructure, never shared with third parties.
• Zero external dependencies — No database service needed; everything runs in a single container with file-based storage.
• Beautiful & functional — Sankey diagrams, multi-year overviews, and CSV import make budgeting intuitive and visual.
• Multi-user ready — Support multiple users with JWT-based authentication and per-user data isolation.
• PWA support — Install as a native-like app on any device for quick access to your budget.

Common Use Cases

• Personal budgeting — Track monthly income and expenses across categories, visualize spending flows with Sankey diagrams.
• Household finance management — Multiple family members can each have their own account with separate budgets.
• Year-over-year financial review — Compare budgets across years to identify trends and adjust spending habits.
• CSV import & migration — Import existing financial data from spreadsheets or other tools via CSV.
• Privacy-conscious expense tracking — Host your own budgeting tool instead of relying on cloud services that monetize your data.

Dependencies for Deployment

Deployment Dependencies