Deploy and Host Rustpad on Railway

About Hosting

Rustpad is an open-source collaborative text editor that synchronizes document edits in real time using operational transformation. The upstream image runs as a single Rust service and does not require PostgreSQL, Redis, or other external infrastructure for basic usage.

For Railway, the cleanest setup is one service using the official Docker image ekzhang/rustpad@sha256:536b63883b2661f31de580df438427f2b799f9284bf9f908708ea3b5d231b585, routed to port 3030. By default, documents are memory-backed and expire after inactivity. Optional SQLite persistence can be enabled with SQLITE_URI.

Why Deploy

• Self-host a private collaborative editor with a minimal runtime footprint
• Deploy as one service with no database dependency for quick startup
• Keep control of data retention and logs in your own Railway project
• Add optional SQLite persistence without changing app architecture
• Use a mature upstream Docker image maintained by the project author

Common Use Cases

• Team scratchpad for architecture notes and pair debugging
• Temporary collaborative coding snippets during incident response
• Classroom or workshop live note editing
• Internal docs drafting where ephemeral documents are acceptable
• Lightweight self-hosted alternative to online paste/edit tools

Dependencies for Deployment

Deployment Dependencies