How do I deploy sentinel on Railway?

You can deploy sentinel on Railway by clicking the "Deploy Now" button on this page. Railway will automatically set up all the necessary services and configurations for you.

What are the system requirements?

Railway handles all the infrastructure requirements. You only need a web browser to deploy and manage your application.

Is this template free to use?

Yes, this template is free to use within your existing Railway account.

Can I customize this template?

Yes, you can fully customize this template. After deployment, you will have full control of what you've deployed in your Railway project.

How do I get support for this template?

You can get support through our community forum: sentinel-73437a9c, or click "Get template help" for this template for more assistance.

Deploy and Host sentinel on Railway

sentinel monitors your Tailscale network and emits events when peers change state (online/offline, runtime, and identity changes). It supports structured routing to sinks like stdout, webhooks, and Discord. You can run it continuously with minimal config and onboard automatically using Tailscale auth credentials.

About Hosting sentinel

Hosting sentinel on Railway is straightforward: deploy the container, provide a Tailscale auth credential, and optionally configure notification routing (for example Discord). The app keeps local state, joins your tailnet, polls or streams network state, detects changes, and sends notifications. For Railway templates, keep required variables minimal and mark sensitive values as secrets. Most other settings can stay unset and use sane defaults. If you want custom routing, provide SENTINEL_NOTIFIER_SINKS and SENTINEL_NOTIFIER_ROUTES as JSON env vars. For local parity, use your compose template and the same env names.

Common Use Cases

Alert a Discord channel when tailnet devices appear/disappear.
Track infrastructure node churn across environments.
Run continuous tailnet monitoring without managing your own VM.

Dependencies for sentinel Hosting

A Tailscale tailnet and auth credential (auth key or OAuth credentials).
An optional notification endpoint (Discord webhook or generic webhook).

Deployment Dependencies

Railway Deployments: https://docs.railway.com/
Railway Variables/Secrets: https://docs.railway.com/guides/variables
Tailscale auth keys: https://tailscale.com/kb/1085/auth-keys
Tailscale tags: https://tailscale.com/kb/1068/tags
Discord webhooks: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/228383668-Intro-to-Webhooks

Implementation Details

# Required (default login mode = auth_key)
SENTINEL_TAILSCALE_AUTH_KEY=tskey-auth-...

# Optional
SENTINEL_TSNET_LOGIN_MODE=auth_key
SENTINEL_NOTIFIER_SINKS=[{"name":"stdout-debug","type":"stdout"},{"name":"discord-primary","type":"discord","url":"${SENTINEL_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL}"}]
SENTINEL_NOTIFIER_ROUTES=[{"event_types":["*"],"sinks":["stdout-debug","discord-primary"]}]
SENTINEL_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL=https://discord.com/api/webhooks/...
SENTINEL_TSNET_ADVERTISE_TAGS=["tag:sentinel"]

Why Deploy sentinel 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 sentinel 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.