Deploy and Host Remark42 on Railway

Remark42 is a lightweight, privacy-focused comment engine for blogs and websites. You embed a small script, and readers can comment anonymously or sign in with social or email providers. It supports Markdown, voting, replies, moderation, import from Disqus and WordPress, and keeps no tracking data.

About Hosting Remark42

This template runs the official umputun/remark42:v1.17.1 image as one service. Comments are stored in BoltDB on a Railway volume at /srv/var, with automatic daily backups next to it, so they survive redeploys. Anonymous commenting is on by default so it works without any OAuth app; add GitHub, Google or email login by setting their variables. A generated ADMIN_PASSWD protects the admin API, and SECRET signs sessions. The Railway proxy ranges are trusted so real client IPs reach rate limits. It is tiny and fits the Hobby plan. Point the embed script at your Railway domain and set SITE to match.

Common Use Cases

Comments on a static blog (Hugo, Jekyll, Astro, Ghost)
Replacing Disqus without ads or tracking
A moderated discussion section on documentation pages

Dependencies for Remark42 Hosting

umputun/remark42:v1.17.1 (official image)
A Railway volume at /srv/var

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Service	Source	Networking	Storage
remark42	`umputun/remark42:v1.17.1`	public domain on 8080	volume at `/srv/var`

Embed it on your site:

<div id="remark42"></div>

Variable	Default	Purpose
`SITE`	`remark`	Site ID used by the embed script
`AUTH_ANON`	`true`	Allow anonymous comments
`ADMIN_PASSWD`	generated	Password for the admin API (user `admin`)
`SECRET`	generated	Signs sessions and tokens

Notes:

Add AUTH_GITHUB_CID/AUTH_GITHUB_CSEC (or Google, email) to enable sign-in; set AUTH_ANON=false to require it.
API calls that post comments need ?site=.

This is a community-maintained deployment package and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by the Remark42 project.

Why Deploy Remark42 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 Remark42 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.