Deploy and Self-Host OpenCode on Railway

OpenCode is an open-source AI coding agent that can read, edit, and navigate your codebase with full project context. This template makes it easy to run OpenCode on Railway with a browser UI, remote CLI access, persistent workspace storage, and production-friendly auth.

Why Use This Template

This template is not just a basic OpenCode container. It adds the pieces needed for a practical hosted setup:

Pinned frontend + backend from the same source ref — avoids version mismatch between the OpenCode core and web UI
Browser-friendly authentication — secure cookie-based login for Chrome and Safari, while still supporting HTTP Basic Auth for CLI and automation
Persistent state on /data — workspace, config, and runtime state survive redeploys and restarts
Optional memory monitor — can automatically restart the service when it has been idle for long enough and memory usage grows too high
Railway Serverless support — lets the service sleep when idle to reduce cost
Auto-installed oh-my-openagent@latest — refreshed automatically on new deployments

Common Use Cases

Self-hosted AI coding workspace — keep OpenCode available from anywhere without depending on a local machine
Remote pair programming — open the same coding environment from a browser or CLI on any device
Persistent autonomous agent — let OpenCode keep its workspace and state across sessions
Internal engineering tooling — run OpenCode inside your own Railway project with your own credentials and storage

Requirements

Persistent volume mounted at /data — required for workspace, config, and state persistence

Key Environment Variables

OPENCODE_SERVER_PASSWORD — required password for browser and CLI access
SOURCE_MODE — build from source for pinned frontend/backend parity; enabled by default
OPENCODE_REF — OpenCode git ref to build when SOURCE_MODE=true
OPENCODE_MODEL — optional default model
ENABLE_MONITOR — enable idle high-memory auto-restart
RAILWAY_API_TOKEN — required if the monitor should trigger Railway restart/redeploy automatically

How It Works

This template runs OpenCode behind a lightweight Node.js wrapper instead of exposing the upstream server directly. The wrapper:

serves the locally built web app when using source mode
issues secure browser session cookies
preserves HTTP Basic Auth for CLI clients
proxies requests to the internal OpenCode server
refreshes plugin cache on new Railway deployments
helps diagnose what keeps a Serverless service awake

That makes the deployment more reliable for real browser usage, remote access, and long-running hosted sessions than a minimal opencode serve setup.

Why Deploy OpenCode 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 OpenCode 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.