Deploy and Host SillyTavern on Railway

SillyTavern is the open-source AI chat and roleplay frontend with 25k+ GitHub stars and 300+ contributors — the power-user standard for AI character interaction, creative writing, and storytelling. Connect Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Ollama, KoboldAI, or any OpenAI-compatible backend. Character cards, World Info lorebooks, group chats with multiple AI characters, user personas, RAG document support, TTS, and a full extensions system.

Running SillyTavern normally means installing Node.js v20+, Git, and 15–30 minutes of local setup — and it only runs while your computer is on. This template deploys it as an always-on cloud service reachable from any browser, on any device. One click. No installs.

This template ships with the one fix every other SillyTavern deploy is missing: a password-protected admin account from the very first request.

About Hosting SillyTavern

SillyTavern is not an AI — it is a highly configurable frontend that formats prompts, manages memory and sampling, and connects to whatever backend you point it at. It stores everything on a persistent volume: character cards, chat history, lorebooks, personas, settings, and your saved connection profiles.

Here is the detail that matters, and that the other Railway listings get wrong. The standard SillyTavern Docker image enables user accounts and creates a default administrator with no password. On a normal deploy, the first person to find your public URL can log in as that administrator with an empty password — read every chat, use whatever LLM backend you configured (on your API credits), and even set a password to lock you, the owner, out for good. This template closes that hole before it can ever be used: the administrator password is generated and written to the volume before the web server starts listening, so the first request your URL ever answers is already protected. The template also refuses to deploy with an empty password rather than putting an open admin panel on the internet, and it leaves any password you later set in the UI untouched across redeploys. The image is pinned to a specific SillyTavern release, so a redeploy is never a surprise upgrade.

Common Use Cases

AI roleplay and character chat — character cards, group chats, personas, and lorebooks with any LLM backend
Creative writing and storytelling — long-form co-writing with memory, World Info, and prompt control
A personal, always-on LLM frontend — one cloud UI in front of Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Ollama, or a local backend
A shared, secured instance — password-protected from first boot so it is safe to keep on a public URL

Dependencies for SillyTavern Hosting

SillyTavern is a single self-contained Node.js application. It needs no database and no Redis — all state lives on the persistent volume. You supply your own LLM backend (an API key for a hosted model, or the address of a self-hosted one) from inside the dashboard after deploying.

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

The template runs a thin wrapper over the upstream Railway image, pinned to SillyTavern 1.18.0. On first boot it seeds the default-user administrator's password from the generated ST_ADMIN_PASSWORD — using SillyTavern's own on-disk user store, written before the server binds a port — so there is no window in which the account is claimable. Seeding is idempotent: it runs only when the account has no password, so a password you set in the UI survives redeploys. A password you never set can never be empty, because the container refuses to boot on an empty ST_ADMIN_PASSWORD.

All persistent data — character cards, chats, lorebooks, personas, settings, and the user store — lives on the volume mounted at /home/node/app/persist and survives every redeploy. Find the generated administrator password in the service's variables, open your Railway domain, and log in.

Why Deploy SillyTavern 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 SillyTavern on Railway you get an always-on, any-device AI frontend with the setup handled — persistent storage wired, the administrator account generated and protected, and automatic HTTPS. The full power-user SillyTavern experience, on infrastructure you own, without leaving an open admin panel on the internet.