Deploy and Host wger Workout Manager

Self-hosted wger (2.8-dev, official wger/server image, digest-pinned) — the workout and nutrition manager with an exercise database, routine planner, weight and nutrition tracking, and a full REST API used by the official Flutter app.

One click provisions four services: the wger web container (Django + gunicorn + bundled nginx for static and media files), a Celery worker with the beat scheduler combined, Railway Postgres, and Railway Redis. First boot migrates the database, loads the bundled exercise fixtures, generates a fresh JWT keypair, and replaces the shipped admin/adminadmin account password with a per-deployment generated secret (WGER_ADMIN_PASSWORD, visible in the Variables tab) before the server accepts its first request.

About Hosting

The web container runs the stock Django stack on gunicorn (port 8000, internal) behind a bundled nginx listening on the Railway-injected port (domain targetPort 8080). nginx serves /static/ and /media/ directly from disk — wger does not serve static files in production on its own, which is why this template keeps the upstream nginx architecture inside the same container instead of a separate sidecar (Railway volumes cannot be shared across services).

web — wrapper image built from the pinned wger/server digest; volume at /home/wger/media (user uploads, downloaded exercise images, JWT keypair); healthcheck at /api/v2/version.
celery — the same digest-pinned image with a start command running a combined Celery worker and beat scheduler (celery worker -B, volume at /home/wger/beat); handles the weekly exercise and ingredient sync and the API cache warming.
Postgres — Railway's Postgres plugin; wired via ${{Postgres.*}} references.
Redis — Railway's Redis plugin; Django cache (db 1), Celery broker and backend (db 2).

Exercise data: bundled fixtures give you a working exercise database immediately on first boot (offline, no network needed). The Celery weekly job keeps exercise and ingredient data in sync with wger.de. Exercise images and videos are NOT downloaded by the Celery job — Railway volumes are per-service, so media downloaded by the worker would never reach the web container. Set DOWNLOAD_EXERCISE_IMAGES_ON_STARTUP=True on web to fetch images during first boot, or run python3 manage.py download-exercise-images once from the web service shell.

Why Deploy

Deploying wger manually means assembling seven upstream compose services (web, nginx sidecar, PowerSync, Postgres, Redis, Celery worker, Celery beat) and editing env files by hand. This template does the Railway-specific glue for you:

The shipped admin/adminadmin fixture account is password-seeded on first boot, before gunicorn accepts traffic — no window where a public URL exposes the default credentials.
A fresh RS256 JWT keypair is generated per deployment (the upstream default keys are public knowledge). Required for the REST API and the official mobile app.
Sessions survive restarts: SECRET_KEY is a per-deployment generated secret, not the upstream default (which regenerates every boot and invalidates all sessions).
PowerSync (mobile offline-sync) and the nginx sidecar are omitted on purpose; everything else matches upstream behavior, and the tradeoffs are documented above.

Common Use Cases

Personal workout and body-weight tracking with routine planning and progress charts.
Nutrition diary with a large ingredient database and barcode-friendly lookups.
A private API backend for the official wger Flutter app (JWT keypair is provisioned).
Family or small-group instances — registration can stay open, guest accounts stay off.

Dependencies for

Postgres and Redis are provisioned automatically by the template. All required environment variables carry per-deployment generated defaults — the deploy form prompts for nothing.

Deployment Dependencies

Railway Postgres (${{Postgres.PGDATABASE}}, ${{Postgres.PGUSER}}, ${{Postgres.PGPASSWORD}}, ${{Postgres.RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}} feed DJANGO_DB_* on web and celery).
Railway Redis (${{Redis.REDIS_URL}} feeds the Django cache and Celery broker/backend).
Outbound HTTPS to wger.de for the weekly data sync jobs.
SECRET_KEY and WGER_ADMIN_PASSWORD use per-deployment generated secrets; change the admin password in the UI after first login (the variable seed only replaces the shipped default once).

Post-deploy steps

Open the Variables tab and reveal WGER_ADMIN_PASSWORD.
Log in at the generated domain as admin with that password and change it under your account settings.
Optional: enable exercise images (DOWNLOAD_EXERCISE_IMAGES_ON_STARTUP=True on web, then redeploy) or fetch them once from the web service shell.

License and credits

wger is AGPL-3.0-or-later, upstream at https://github.com/wger-project/wger (docker stack: https://github.com/wger-project/docker). This repository only packages the deployment for Railway.