Deploy and Host Oksskolten on Railway

Oksskolten is an AI-native RSS reader. For every article in every feed, it fetches the original page, extracts the full text with Mozilla Readability, and stores it as clean Markdown. You can then read, search, summarize, translate and chat with your feeds without leaving the app.

About Hosting Oksskolten

This template runs the same production stack that upstream ships in compose.prod.yaml. It has four services on Railway's private network:

Oksskolten: the server and the web app, with a volume at /data for the SQLite database.
Meilisearch: full-text search over every stored article, with its own volume.
RSS-Bridge: makes feeds for sites that do not publish one.
FlareSolverr: a headless Chromium that fetches pages behind a JavaScript challenge.

Only the Oksskolten service has a public domain. Secrets are generated for each deploy, and there is nothing to fill in.

Common Use Cases

Read full articles from all your feeds in one place, with no click-through to ad-heavy pages.
Search the complete text of everything you have subscribed to, not only the titles.
Get AI summaries and translations of long or foreign-language articles, with your own Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini or Ollama key.
Ask questions across your reading history with the built-in chat.
Follow sites that have no RSS feed, through RSS-Bridge.

Dependencies for Oksskolten Hosting

Oksskolten ghcr.io/babarot/oksskolten:0.5.0
Meilisearch getmeili/meilisearch:v1.13.3
RSS-Bridge rssbridge/rss-bridge (pinned digest, same as upstream)
FlareSolverr ghcr.io/flaresolverr/flaresolverr:v3.5.2

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

First login. Open the public URL right after the deploy finishes. The first visitor sees a setup page and creates the only account. After that, setup is locked and returns 403. Do this before you share the URL with anyone.

AI features. Summaries, translation and chat are off until you add a provider key. Go to Settings and enter an Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini API key. Keys are stored in the app database, not in Railway variables.

GitHub login and passkeys. These are also configured in Settings, after the first login. Add a passkey from Settings > Security.

API tokens. Create them in Settings > Security > API Tokens, for scripts or the MCP server.

Responsible fetching. Oksskolten checks your feeds every 5 minutes (CRON_SCHEDULE) and fetches each new article page. FlareSolverr is turned on, as upstream ships it. It is used only when a page answers with a JavaScript challenge. Subscribe only to sites you have permission to fetch, and follow each site's terms of use. To turn FlareSolverr off, delete FLARESOLVERR_URL on the Oksskolten service and remove the FlareSolverr service. To limit it, set FLARESOLVERR_CONCURRENCY to 1.

Variables you can change (on the Oksskolten service):

CRON_SCHEDULE: how often feeds are checked. Default */5 * * * *.
FETCH_CONCURRENCY: feeds fetched in parallel. Default 5.
PARSE_MAX_THREADS: article extraction threads. Default 2.
OLLAMA_BASE_URL: point at your own Ollama server for local models.

Storage. All feeds, articles, settings and keys are in /data/rss.db on the Oksskolten volume. The search index can be rebuilt from it, so the Oksskolten volume is the one to back up.

Troubleshooting.

A feed shows an error and the page uses Cloudflare: FlareSolverr could not pass the challenge, or it is turned off. The rest of the app is not affected.
Search returns "Search index is building": Meilisearch is rebuilding after a restart. Wait one minute.
You lost the password and have no passkey: there is one account by design. Delete the Oksskolten volume to start over. This deletes all data.

Scaling. Oksskolten is a single instance with SQLite. Do not add replicas to the Oksskolten service. FlareSolverr uses the most memory, because it runs Chromium.

Why Deploy Oksskolten 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 Oksskolten 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.