Deploy and Host wanderer on Railway

wanderer is a self-hosted trail database. Upload GPX, GeoJSON, TCX or KML tracks and get an interactive map, distance and elevation profile, waypoints, photos, summit logs and comments. Organise trails into lists, search everything, and optionally federate with other instances over ActivityPub. This is a community-maintained template; it is not affiliated with the wanderer project.

About Hosting wanderer

wanderer is three pieces that have to agree with each other: a SvelteKit frontend, a PocketBase database that also stores uploaded photos and GPX files, and a Meilisearch index that every listing page depends on. The two stateful pieces each need their own persistent volume, and all three must share the same Meilisearch key and proxy secret. Only the frontend is exposed to the internet; the database and the search index stay on Railway's private network, which is what keeps the deployment safe.

The other hosting problem is the first five minutes. A fresh wanderer instance has open registration and no privileged first account, so whoever reaches the public URL first can claim the instance. This template runs a wrapper image that creates your account inside the container before the public listener accepts a single request, and ships with registration switched off. The generated password is a Railway variable you can read in the dashboard, and you change it in the app afterwards.

Why Deploy wanderer 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 wanderer 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.

Concretely, this template wires the three services together, generates every secret, attaches both volumes, points the frontend at its own public domain and creates your account, so there is nothing to fill in before clicking deploy.

Common Use Cases

Keep a private, permanent record of hikes, rides and ski tours instead of a commercial fitness account that can change its terms.
Plan routes on the map, save waypoints and share a single trail link with the people coming along.
Run a small instance for a club or family, with accounts you create yourself.
Federate with other wanderer instances to follow friends' public trails without a central service.

Dependencies for wanderer Hosting

A Meilisearch service for search and for resolving user profiles.
A PocketBase service carrying wanderer's schema, with a volume for the database and uploads.
A public frontend service with the instance's own HTTPS domain.

Deployment Dependencies

wanderer upstream project and documentation: https://github.com/Flomp/wanderer
Template repository, wrapper image and tests: https://github.com/youssefsiam38/wanderer-railway
Published image: ghcr.io/youssefsiam38/wanderer-railway
wanderer is licensed AGPL-3.0-only. Running it as a network service makes you a distributor under section 13, so keep the corresponding source of the version you run available.

Implementation Details

The wrapper adds no application code. It validates the variables wanderer silently misbehaves without, refuses configurations that would lock you out or leave the instance open, waits for PocketBase, creates the owner account, and then hands off to the upstream start command. Every service binds a dual-stack listener so Railway's private network can reach it.