Deploy and Host Owncast on Railway

Owncast is a free and open source live streaming and chat server: point OBS (or any RTMP source) at it and you get your own Twitch-style stream page with built-in chat, viewer stats, and Fediverse integration — fully under your control, with no platform ads or rules.

About Hosting Owncast

This template runs Owncast as a single Railway service. The web interface and HLS video playback are served over your Railway domain, while RTMP ingest (what OBS connects to) is exposed through a Railway TCP proxy on port 1935. Your admin password and stream key are generated as template variables and applied on every boot. Stream recordings, chat history, and configuration persist on the attached volume at /app/data. Transcoding runs on CPU via the bundled ffmpeg.

Common Use Cases

• Personal live streaming with your own stream page, chat, and no ads
• Community or event broadcasts (meetups, church services, gaming, radio with video)
• A backup/simulcast target alongside Twitch or YouTube via OBS multi-output

Dependencies for Owncast Hosting

• None — everything (web server, RTMP ingest, chat, ffmpeg) is in the one service

Deployment Dependencies

• Owncast documentation
• Template source on GitHub

Implementation Details

Your stream page is the service's Railway domain. The admin panel is at /admin — username admin, password from the ADMIN_PASSWORD variable.

To go live from OBS:

1. Add a TCP proxy to the service: Settings → Networking → TCP Proxy → application port 1935. Railway assigns an address like turntable.proxy.rlwy.net:12345.
2. In OBS set Server to rtmp://turntable.proxy.rlwy.net:12345/live (your host/port will differ).
3. Set the Stream Key to the STREAM_KEY variable's value.

Notes and limits:

• Transcoding is CPU-only (Railway has no GPU). The default single-quality passthrough works on any plan; extra quality variants in Admin → Video need more vCPU.
• Latency is typical HLS (tens of seconds). Lower it in Admin → Video → Latency Buffer at some cost in stability.
• Changing ADMIN_PASSWORD or STREAM_KEY variables takes effect on the next deploy/restart.

Why Deploy Owncast 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 Owncast 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.