Deploy and Host overstoryd on Railway

overstoryd is the community host for Story, an app for writing and organizing shared trees of pages on the Mac and iPhone. It keeps a community's trees, their full history and who may read or edit them, and it serves public pages on the web. People join a community with an invitation link.

About Hosting overstoryd

The template runs one service from the ghcr.io/jxe/overstoryd image, with a volume at /data and a Railway domain. You choose two handles: your community's (such as garden) and your own (such as alice). When the deploy finishes, the Deploy Logs show a founder link that only you can see. Open it in Story on a Mac. Story creates your identity and claims the community, and you become its administrator. From then on you invite people from Story's share sheet. Running it means keeping the domain stable, turning on volume backups, and redeploying to update.

Common Use Cases

A private, shared set of pages for a family, a team or a group of friends
Public pages anyone can read on the web, edited from Story
Your own home for your Story identity, instead of an account on someone else's host

Dependencies for overstoryd Hosting

The Story app on a Mac (https://github.com/jxe/arbor/releases/latest), to claim the community and invite people
A persistent volume at /data (included in the template)

Implementation Details

The template generates OVERSTORYD_FOUNDER_CODE. Once the founder has claimed the community, the host stops using it and the variable can be deleted. Keep the service at one replica: overstoryd stores everything in SQLite on its one volume. Your domain appears in every link to your community, so add a custom domain (and set OVERSTORYD_DOMAIN) before inviting anyone, if you want one. To update, redeploy; to stay on a release, pin the image tag, such as ghcr.io/jxe/overstoryd:0.1.8. Full guide: https://github.com/jxe/arbor/blob/main/packages/overstoryd/deploy/README.md#start-your-own-community

Why Deploy overstoryd 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 overstoryd 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.