Deploy and Host TrendRadar — Automated News Monitoring & Daily Intelligence on Railway

TrendRadar is an automated news monitoring system that crawls multiple sources, deduplicates content, stores daily datasets in S3-compatible storage, and generates readable HTML intelligence reports. It is designed for continuous monitoring, historical tracking, and AI-assisted analysis.

About Hosting TrendRadar — Automated News Monitoring & Daily Intelligence

This template deploys TrendRadar as a cron-based service on Railway. It periodically collects trending news and RSS feeds, processes and deduplicates them, and stores results in a Railway Bucket using S3-compatible APIs. Optional services include an MCP server for AI/agent access and a web-based S3 manager, both typically exposed through authenticated gateways. All data persists across restarts and deployments.

Common Use Cases

• Daily trend and news intelligence for products, markets, or competitors
• RSS aggregation with historical tracking and keyword filtering
• AI-driven analysis pipelines using Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Dependencies for TrendRadar — Automated News Monitoring & Daily Intelligence Hosting

• Railway Bucket: S3-compatible object storage for databases and reports
• TrendRadar service: crawler, scheduler, and report generator
• Optional MCP service: AI/agent interface to query stored data
• Optional gateways: Basic Auth access to internal services

Deployment Dependencies

• Upstream project: https://github.com/sansan0/TrendRadar
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): https://modelcontextprotocol.io/
• Railway documentation: https://docs.railway.com/

Implementation Details

TrendRadar runs in cron mode and writes daily SQLite databases
(news/YYYY-MM-DD.db, rss/YYYY-MM-DD.db) to the Railway Bucket.

Uploading HTML Reports to the Bucket

TrendRadar can optionally upload generated HTML reports from /app/output to the Railway Bucket after each execution. This allows reports to be persisted, shared, and served independently of the running container.

A common setup is to upload reports under a prefix such as web/, producing paths like:

• web/index.html
• web/html/YYYY-MM-DD/summary.html

These files can then be accessed through an S3 gateway or static hosting layer.

TrendRadar MCP (AI / Agent Access)

The optional TrendRadar MCP service exposes collected data through the Model Context Protocol, allowing AI clients and agents to query, analyze, and summarize trends programmatically.

The MCP server does not crawl data itself. It reads from the same storage backend as TrendRadar and operates purely as an analysis interface.

Connecting an MCP Client (Example)

Below is a minimal MCP client configuration using streamableHttp. Replace the URL with your Railway MCP gateway domain.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "trendradar": {
      "type": "streamableHttp",
      "url": "https:///mcp"
    }
  }
}

MCP Environment Variables (Minimal)

These variables are typically shared between trendradar and trendradar-mcp so crawling and analysis stay aligned.

STORAGE_BACKEND=remote
S3_ENDPOINT_URL=...
S3_BUCKET_NAME=...
S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...
S3_REGION=auto
PORT=3333

Gateway & Security (Basic Auth)

It is strongly recommended not to expose the MCP service directly. Instead, deploy a small HTTP gateway in front of it.

Typical gateway behavior:

• Terminates public HTTP(S)
• Enforces Basic Authentication
• Proxies requests to trendradar-mcp on the Railway private network

AUTH_USER=admin
AUTH_PASS=********
DOMAIN_NAME=...
UPSTREAM_URL=http://trendradar-mcp:3333

S3 Manager (Bucket File Access)

The optional S3 Manager service provides a simple web UI to browse the contents of the Railway Bucket. It is useful for inspecting databases, verifying report uploads, and debugging storage behavior.

For security, the S3 Manager is typically exposed only through an authenticated gateway.

PORT=8080
ENDPOINT=storage.railway.app
REGION=auto
ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...
USE_SSL=true

Configuration Injection (Optional)

TrendRadar supports injecting full configuration files through environment variables. At startup, these values can be written into /app/config, overriding the defaults.

FREQUENCY_WORDS_FILE=...      # Content of frequency_words.txt
CONFIG_YAML_FILE=...          # Content of config.yaml
AI_PROMPT_FILE=...            # Content of ai_analysis_prompt.txt

This allows full customization of keywords, sources, and analysis behavior without modifying the container image. Copy the original files from: https://github.com/sansan0/TrendRadar/tree/master/config
Modify them as needed, then paste the full content into the corresponding environment variable.

Why Deploy TrendRadar — Automated News Monitoring & Daily Intelligence 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 TrendRadar — Automated News Monitoring & Daily Intelligence 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.