Pokemon Showdown on Railway

Run your own Pokemon Showdown battle server — the open-source server behind pokemonshowdown.com — with one click. Custom formats and ladders, your own moderation team, your own chat rooms and tournaments, on your own URL.

This template provisions a single Dockerized service cloned from smogon/pokemon-showdown at a pinned commit (see UPSTREAM_PIN in the repo), so deploys are reproducible and upgrades are deliberate:

Persistent storage — a Railway volume mounted at /data holds logs/ (battle logs, replays, chat logs, user stats) and config/ (your config.js, usergroups.csv, custom CSS/JS). Everything survives redeploys and upgrades.
Zero configuration — Railway assigns the port; the start script wires it through, seeds the config on first boot, and creates the directories the server expects. There are no deploy-form variables to fill in.
Modest footprint — a small community server runs comfortably in ~256–512MB RAM, so Railway's low-cost Hobby tier is enough. 24/7 availability included.
Official client included — the deployed domain redirects to the hosted Showdown client, which connects back to your server over WebSockets; players need zero setup.

Become an admin (do this first!)

A server without admins can't be moderated, so this is the most important post-deploy step:

Open your server's client, open the settings gear → Options → Register, and register your username.
Add your username to config/usergroups.csv on the volume: one line, YourName,~ — your username, a comma, a tilde, no space after the comma. Easiest way: railway ssh -s and run echo 'YourName,~' > /app/config/usergroups.csv (writes through the symlink onto the volume). The config volume persists, so this only needs to happen once.
Restart the service, log back in — you are now ~ Administrator. Promote others in-game with /globaladmin, /globalmod, /globaldriver, /roompromote, etc.

Upgrading Showdown

The upstream repo moves daily; this template pins a commit so your server never changes under you.

Get the latest commit SHA from https://github.com/smogon/pokemon-showdown/commits/master
Update UPSTREAM_PIN (and the SHOWDOWN_COMMIT ARG in the Dockerfile) in a commit and push — Railway redeploys.
User data, config, and battle logs live on the volume, so upgrades are drop-in.

Deploy and Host

About Hosting

Deploying this template creates one Railway service built from the public GitHub repo's Dockerfile (Node.js 22, per upstream's requirement) plus one persistent volume mounted at /data. Railway injects the PORT variable and generates a public domain automatically; the start script passes the port to Showdown (node pokemon-showdown $PORT), seeds config/config.js from the image's pristine copy on first boot, and symlinks logs/ and config/ into the volume. The first deployment passes a healthcheck against the server's root HTTP route before it is marked live. Running cost is a single low-memory service — typically the cheapest Hobby-tier plan — since Showdown is a lightweight Node.js server for small communities.

Why Deploy

Self-hosting Showdown on Railway gives you a permanently online community battle server without renting or babysitting a VPS: redeploys don't lose battle logs or registered-staff config thanks to the volume, the pinned upstream commit means upgrades happen when you choose (bump one SHA), and the one-click flow avoids the setup mistakes that break manual installs — port wiring, missing log directories on fresh volumes, and config seeding. Unlike manual clones, the admin path (usergroups.csv → ~ Administrator → in-game promotion) is documented and verified end to end.

Common Use Cases

A friend group or community wants its own lobby with its own rules, staff, and tournaments instead of playing on the crowded official server.
Hosting custom formats and ladders (edit config/formats.js on the volume) for side-server style play.
Running moderated events: tournaments, tours, and chat rooms controlled by your own ~/@/% staff promoted in-game.
Development and testing of Showdown mods, bots, or client features against a private server you control.

Dependencies for

Deployment Dependencies

smogon/pokemon-showdown — the upstream server, cloned at the commit pinned in UPSTREAM_PIN (MIT licensed).
Node.js 22 — upstream requires Node ≥ 22.18; baked into the Docker image.
Railway volume — provisioned automatically, mounted at /data for all persistent state.
No databases, no external services, and no deploy-form variables: authentication uses Showdown's official login server out of the box.