Outerbase Studio for railway.app

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Deploy Outerbase Studio on Railway with one click.

Deploy and Host Outerbase Studio on Railway

Outerbase Studio is a lightweight, open-source database GUI that runs in your browser and connects to Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite. This template packages the community-maintained chewcw/outerbase-studio Docker image so you can deploy a working instance on Railway in a single click, without installing a desktop database client or managing a server yourself.

About Hosting Outerbase Studio

Outerbase Studio serves its UI from a single container and connects to your databases directly from the browser session. Hosting it on Railway means Railway builds the Docker image, terminates TLS on a public domain, and keeps the container restarted and healthy — you only manage the database connections you add inside the app.

Why Deploy Outerbase Studio on Railway

Zero infrastructure management — no VM or Docker host to patch or size
Instant HTTPS — Railway issues a public domain with TLS out of the box
Basic-auth gate included — STUDIO_USER/STUDIO_PASSWORD keep the public domain from being wide open
Automatic rebuilds — Renovate keeps the pinned upstream image current, Railway redeploys on push
Team access — invite teammates to the same Railway project instead of sharing local installs

Common Use Cases

A lightweight, browser-based SQL client for a database already running on Railway
Giving a small team shared query access without installing a desktop SQL client each
Ad-hoc data exploration and debugging against Postgres, MySQL, or SQLite
A disposable database GUI you can spin up per project instead of a shared, long-lived instance

Dependencies for Outerbase Studio

The community chewcw/outerbase-studio Docker image (pinned tag, see Dockerfile)
STUDIO_USER and STUDIO_PASSWORD environment variables for basic auth
Network access to whichever databases you connect to from within the app

✨ Features

Outerbase Studio on Railway with a Dockerfile build
Pinned upstream image so Renovate can raise update PRs
Healthcheck and restart policy preconfigured
Persistent volume mount path declared

🚀 Quick Start

Click "Deploy on Railway"
Set the environment variables listed below
Attach a volume at /app/data before sending production traffic
Wait for the build and open the generated URL

⚙️ Configuration

Environment variables

STUDIO_USER=admin
STUDIO_PASSWORD=changeme

Set real credentials as Railway variables, never in a file inside this repository. Confirmed on a live deployment: the container refuses to start (or crash-loops) without these two set.

💾 Persistence

railway.toml declares requiredMountPath = "/app/data". Attach a Railway volume to that path before production traffic, otherwise all data is lost on every redeploy.

⚠️ Known limitations

This template uses the community-maintained chewcw/outerbase-studio image (pinned at v0.9.2), because the upstream outerbase/studio project has no official Docker image yet (tracking discussion).

The image ignores $PORT and always binds to 8080 internally, regardless of what Railway sets — confirmed on a live deployment. This is harmless: Railway's proxy auto-detects the listening port, so the generated domain still routes correctly with no startCommand needed.
/app/data is a precautionary mount path; it is not confirmed that the image persists anything there, since Outerbase Studio normally keeps connections in the browser rather than server-side.

🐳 Local Development

git clone https://github.com/vergissberlin/railwayapp-outerbase-studio.git
cd railwayapp-outerbase-studio
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d

Then open http://localhost:3000 (mapped to the container's internal port 8080).

🪲 Bug Reporting

Found a bug? Create an issue or open a pull request with a fix.

🤝 Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

📝 License

MIT — see LICENSE.

🔒 Security

All credentials are supplied as environment variables, never committed
Railway terminates TLS for the generated domain
Renovate keeps the pinned upstream image up to date

Railway runtime defaults

railway.toml ships these defaults:

Healthcheck path: /
Restart policy: ON_FAILURE with up to 10 retries
Dockerfile-based build

Outerbase Studio ignores $PORT and always listens on 8080; Railway's proxy auto-detects this, so no start command is configured.