Deploy and Host WeKan on Railway

WeKan is an open-source, self-hosted Kanban board, a Trello alternative built with Meteor. Teams organise work on boards with swimlanes, lists and cards, and cards carry checklists, labels, due dates, attachments and comments. It has an admin panel, a REST API, webhooks, and LDAP, OAuth2 and CAS sign-in.

About Hosting WeKan

Hosting WeKan means running the Node.js (Meteor) web app next to a MongoDB database and keeping both the database and the uploaded files on persistent storage. MongoDB runs as a single-node replica set with authentication, so WeKan gets live updates through change streams. ROOT_URL has to match the public address, or the links in emails break. A fresh WeKan makes the first person who signs up the administrator, so a public deploy has to claim that account straight away. This template creates the admin account from deploy variables with a generated password on the first boot, then turns off open sign-up.

Common Use Cases

Team task boards for software sprints, support queues or content calendars
A private, self-hosted Trello replacement that keeps your project data under your control
Personal to-do and project tracking with checklists, due dates and attachments

Dependencies for WeKan Hosting

WeKan web app (ghcr.io/wekan/wekan, pinned to v13.06 by digest)
MongoDB 7.0 (mongo:7.0.45, pinned by digest), single-node replica set with authentication

Deployment Dependencies

WeKan source and documentation: https://github.com/wekan/wekan
WeKan v13.06 release notes: https://github.com/wekan/wekan/releases/tag/v13.06
WeKan's upstream MongoDB 7 Docker Compose file: https://github.com/wekan/wekan/blob/v13.06/docker-compose-mongodb-v7.yml
MongoDB Docker image: https://hub.docker.com/_/mongo

Implementation Details

Sign in: open the public URL and log in as admin (or your WEKAN_ADMIN_USERNAME). The password is the WEKAN_ADMIN_PASSWORD variable on the WeKan service. You can change it after you log in, with Change Password in your member menu.

Sign-up is closed. On the first boot only, while the database has no users, the WeKan start command creates the admin account and unticks Self-Registration in the Admin Panel (under "Login: Allow"). To add people, use Invite People in the same place, or tick Self-Registration again. Later restarts and redeploys leave that setting and your users alone.

Storage: MongoDB data is on a volume at /data/db. Attachments and avatars are on a volume at /data on the WeKan service.

Email is not configured. To get invitations, notifications and password resets, add your SMTP server in the Admin Panel email settings, or set the MAIL_URL and MAIL_FROM variables on the WeKan service.

Updating: change the WeKan image tag to a newer release and redeploy. WeKan runs its own schema upgrade at start.

Why Deploy WeKan 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 WeKan 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.