Deploy opensondage-template

OpenSondage / Framadate — Self-Hosted Polls & Scheduling on Railway

One click deploys Framadate (OpenSondage) — the classic open-source tool for date polls and classic polls — together with its MariaDB database, fully configured and ready to share poll links.

⚠️ Honest maintenance disclosure: Framadate's upstream project is effectively unmaintained (final release 1.1.19, December 2021, pinned by digest in this template). It still works well for polls and scheduling, but expect no upstream security or bug fixes. If you need a maintained alternative, look at Rallly or crab.fit — both are actively developed and also self-hostable.

Features

• Date polls and classic polls — the original "find a time that works for everyone" workflow, with public voting links and private admin links.
• One-click MariaDB included — all polls, votes and comments live in MariaDB on a persistent volume; the app itself is stateless.
• Zero deploy-form inputs — admin password, database credentials and hostnames are generated automatically during provisioning.
• Auto schema migration — the container bootstraps the full database schema at boot (idempotent, re-run safe), so a fresh deploy is immediately poll-creating.
• Email-ready (optional) — set USE_SMTP=true plus your SMTP_* values after deploy to mail poll links and notifications; everything else works with email disabled.

Deploy and Host

Deploying provisions two services:

On first boot the app container waits for Apache, generates the admin credentials and configuration from its environment, and runs the database schema migration through /admin/migration.php (idempotent — tracked in the fd_framadate_migration table). Within a minute of clicking deploy the poll home page is live on your Railway domain.

About Hosting

Hosting Framadate yourself means your polls, voter names and schedules live in your own database — no third-party tracking, no poll expiry imposed by a hosting company, and no feature gating. This template keeps the footprint small: one stateless PHP container and one MariaDB container with a volume, typically $3–5/month on Railway's Hobby plan.

What is provisioned and configured for you:

• framadate service — public domain on port 80; SERVERNAME follows your Railway domain automatically; admin panel at /admin protected by HTTP Basic Auth with a generated ADMIN_PASSWORD.
• mariadb service — root and app passwords generated via ${{secret(24,"alnum")}}; the app connects over Railway private networking (DB_HOST=${{mariadb.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}, DB_PASSWORD=${{mariadb.MARIADB_PASSWORD}}).
• A persistent volume on MariaDB — deleting/redeploying the app never loses polls; only deleting the volume does.

Why Deploy

• Manual deploy is fiddly — Framadate needs Apache with mod_php, a MySQL schema migration through an admin panel, and a hand-written config.php. This template ships a boot wrapper that does all three on every start.
• Railway fixes baked in — the image pins the final upstream release, forces the correct Apache MPM (fixes the AH00534 crash-loop seen on container platforms), defaults the UI to English, and ships with SMTP disabled so an unreachable mail relay can never break poll creation.
• Data safety by design — polls survive redeploys and restarts because persistence lives in the MariaDB volume, not the app container.

Common Use Cases

• Team and community scheduling — meeting dates, game nights, events.
• Classic polls — text-choice polls for names, topics, logos, decisions.
• Self-hosted alternative to Doodle/StrawPoll for privacy-conscious groups.
• A simple, proven poll tool for clubs, classrooms and open-source projects.

Dependencies for

The template is self-contained: no external database, cache or API keys are required. Email delivery (optional) is the only external dependency.

Deployment Dependencies

• None required at deploy time — no deploy-form inputs; secrets and hostnames are provisioned automatically.
• Optional SMTP relay — for email notifications set on the framadate service after deploy: USE_SMTP=true, SMTP_HOST, SMTP_PORT (587), SMTP_SECURE (tls/ssl), SMTP_AUTH, SMTP_USERNAME, SMTP_PASSWORD, and EMAIL_ADRESS (sender address your relay accepts).
• Railway private networking (built-in) — used for app→database traffic.

Post-deploy steps

1. Open your Railway domain — the poll home page loads.
2. Open /admin — user admin, password from the ADMIN_PASSWORD variable on the framadate service (Variables tab).
3. Schema migration runs automatically at boot; if you ever need to re-run it, open /admin/migration.php and log in with the same credentials.
4. Create a poll from the home page and share the public link.

Troubleshooting

• DB errors right after deploy — MariaDB may still be initializing; the app retries the migration for ~1 minute at boot, and you can re-run /admin/migration.php manually at any time (idempotent).
• Poll creation errors mentioning SMTP — USE_SMTP was enabled without a working relay; set it back to false or fix the SMTP_* variables.
• Lost data — polls live only in the MariaDB volume; deleting that volume deletes all polls.