Deploy and Host Open Excalidraw on Railway

Open Excalidraw is a self-hostable collaboration and persistence layer built around the published Excalidraw editor: named drawing dashboards, authenticated real-time editing, revision history with restore, email-based invitations with owner/editor/viewer permissions, public read-only share links, and per-drawing chat.

About Hosting Open Excalidraw

The template deploys one prebuilt application service (ghcr.io/strangenoob/open-excalidraw) beside Railway's managed PostgreSQL. Railway generates the authentication secret and the operator recovery token, references the private database URL, and mounts a persistent volume at /data/assets for binary assets. The image applies database migrations before each start. No user-entered variables are required. SMTP is optional: without it, owners copy invitation links for manual delivery.

The application service must run as exactly one replica: real-time collaboration state lives in-process, and the asset volume mounts to a single instance. Scaling out is unsupported.

Why Deploy Open Excalidraw on Railway

• Keep drawings, revision history, and uploaded assets in a database and volume you control.
• Start with generated secrets and a working public domain — no manual configuration at deploy time.
• Email/password sign-in works immediately; add Google, GitHub, or any generic OIDC provider later through environment variables.
• Real-time collaboration and chat run inside the single service with no extra infrastructure.
• Move binary assets to any S3-compatible bucket later with the bundled migration CLI.

Common Use Cases

• A team whiteboard with named drawings, private tags, and per-drawing permissions.
• Architecture and design diagrams kept under revision history with restore.
• Publishing live read-only share links to documents, wikis, or customers.
• Classroom or workshop sketching where guests draw locally and sign up to persist.

Dependencies for Open Excalidraw Hosting

Open Excalidraw ships as a single Node.js image that serves the web UI, REST API, and Socket.IO collaboration from port 3000, persisting to PostgreSQL.

Deployment Dependencies

• Railway service running ghcr.io/strangenoob/open-excalidraw:latest
• Railway PostgreSQL service
• Private ${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}} service reference
• Generated BETTER_AUTH_SECRET and ADMIN_RESET_TOKEN
• Persistent volume at /data/assets for binary assets