Deploy and Host WhoDB on Railway

About Hosting WhoDB

WhoDB Community Edition is a lightweight database explorer for browsing schemas, running queries, and inspecting data through a web interface. This template runs the exact-pinned WhoDB image behind an exact-pinned Caddy Basic Auth wrapper and persists WhoDB's encrypted session state on a Railway volume. It deliberately does not deploy a target database: connect only databases you own and keep them private.

Common Use Cases

Explore a private development or staging database without installing a desktop client.
Inspect schemas and run bounded queries through a secured browser interface.
Provide a small team with one protected, persistent WhoDB workspace.
Connect to an existing Railway database over the private network using a dedicated least-privilege account.

Dependencies for WhoDB Hosting

Deployment Dependencies

The template creates one public whodb service and one Railway volume mounted at /data. There is no bundled database, Redis, Bucket, gateway, TCP proxy, or second service. WhoDB and Caddy are pinned by immutable image digests. One replica runs continuously with Serverless disabled.

Railway generates the Basic Auth password and WhoDB encryption seed. The fixed username is whodb. Caddy protects every UI and API route; only /healthz is intentionally unauthenticated for Railway readiness checks. Secure cookies, disabled update checks, disabled heartbeat telemetry, and a disabled manual credential form are the defaults.

After deployment, use username whodb with the generated Basic Auth password. Configure an optional database profile through WhoDB environment variables. Keep the target private and use a dedicated least-privilege database account.

The /data volume persists encrypted WhoDB sessions. It does not contain or back up target database data. The documented recovery path is an application-level /data archive restored onto the mounted volume; atomic Railway replacement-volume recovery is not claimed.

Why Deploy WhoDB on Railway?

Railway provides the build, TLS domain, private networking, generated secrets, health checks, restart policy, metrics, and persistent volume in one deploy. The template adds a tested full-path authentication boundary and conservative defaults while keeping the topology to one application service.

This independent community template is not affiliated with or endorsed by WhoDB, Caddy, or Railway. Support covers the wrapper and documented Railway contract; upstream application behavior, database permissions, external connectivity, and platform/account incidents belong to their respective owners.