Deploy and Host Soft Serve on Railway

Soft Serve is a self-hostable Git server from Charm with a delightful terminal UI over SSH. You create, browse and manage repositories with ssh, clone and push over SSH or HTTPS, and control access with users, collaborators and access tokens. Git LFS is built in, and it runs as a single small Go binary.

About Hosting Soft Serve

This template deploys Soft Serve v0.12.2 from the official image with repositories and its database on a Railway volume. SSH is exposed through the Railway TCP proxy and HTTPS through the Railway domain. Anonymous access is off, so every repository is private unless you change it. You must paste your SSH public key into SOFT_SERVE_INITIAL_ADMIN_KEYS when deploying; that key becomes the admin. The unencrypted git daemon protocol is disabled. Soft Serve is light and fits the Hobby plan, with storage growing with your repositories. Back up the volume regularly to protect your repositories.

Common Use Cases

Private Git hosting for personal projects, dotfiles and small teams
A lightweight Git remote for deployment scripts and infrastructure code
Browsing repositories from the terminal over SSH

Dependencies for Soft Serve Hosting

charmcli/soft-serve:v0.12.2 (official image)
A Railway volume at /soft-serve
A Railway TCP proxy for SSH

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Service	Image	Networking	Storage
softserve	`charmcli/soft-serve:v0.12.2`	public HTTPS on 23232; TCP proxy to SSH 23231	volume at `/soft-serve`

ssh -p                         # TUI
ssh -p   repo create my-app --private
git remote add origin ssh://:/my-app
git push origin main

Variable	Default	Purpose
`SOFT_SERVE_INITIAL_ADMIN_KEYS`	empty, required	Your SSH public key(s); applied on first start
`SOFT_SERVE_ANON_ACCESS`	`no-access`	Anonymous access level
`SOFT_SERVE_SSH_PUBLIC_URL` / `SOFT_SERVE_HTTP_PUBLIC_URL`	TCP proxy / domain	Clone URLs shown in the UI

Notes:

If several keys are loaded in your SSH agent, use -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -i , or Soft Serve may identify you by another key as a guest.
For HTTPS clones, create a token with ssh ... token create and use it as the password.

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

Why Deploy Soft Serve 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 Soft Serve 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.