Deploy and Host RSSBox on Railway

RSSBox, formerly RSS Translator, takes any RSS or JSON feed and gives you back a better one: translated titles or content, AI summaries, full-text fetching, keyword and AI filtering, and several feeds merged into one. You subscribe to the result in the reader you already use.

About Hosting RSSBox

RSSBox is a Django application with a background cron worker, a SQLite database and Redis as its cache. Hosting it means keeping three things right: the database and the translation cache have to live on a volume or every redeploy throws away your feeds and re-pays for every translation; Redis has to actually start, because the app blocks on it at boot; and the instance has to know its own public URL, since that URL is baked into every feed link it hands to subscribers. It also ships a default administrator account, which on a public domain is an open door unless the password is replaced.

Common Use Cases

Read foreign-language feeds in your own language, with the original kept beside the translation
Turn noisy high-volume feeds into a short daily digest with AI summaries
Filter a feed down to the keywords or topics you actually care about
Merge a dozen sources into one feed for a reader, a Telegram channel or a newsletter

Dependencies for RSSBox Hosting

Redis, used as the cache and as the boot gate for the application
A volume for /app/data, which holds the SQLite database and the translation cache
A translation engine account (OpenAI or DeepL), configured inside the app after the first login

Deployment Dependencies

RSSBox source and its documentation
This template's repository

Implementation Details

The published RSSBox template in the catalog sits at 11% health. Its Redis is bitnami/redis:7.2.5, and Bitnami closed the public tag catalog, so that image can no longer be pulled: the Redis service fails and the app waits for a cache that never answers. This template fixes that and three more things:

Redis is redis:8.6.5-alpine, pinned, password-protected, with an appendonly volume.
The admin password is generated per deployment. Upstream creates admin with the password rssbox, printed in its own source. Here ADMIN_PASSWORD is a generated variable and it is applied on every boot before the web server takes traffic.
SECRET_KEY is a stable generated variable. Without it Django mints a new key at every start, which silently invalidates sessions and CSRF tokens on each redeploy.
SITE_URL follows the Railway domain instead of the https://example.com the published template ships, so the feed links your subscribers get point at your instance.

First login is admin with the value of ADMIN_PASSWORD from the service variables.

Why Deploy RSSBox 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 RSSBox 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.