Deploy and Host Writebook on Railway

Writebook is the free publishing app from 37signals, the makers of Basecamp and HEY. Write books, manuals, handbooks and documentation in Markdown, add picture pages and chapters, and publish them on the web, publicly or to invited readers only. It is MIT-licensed and runs as a single container with SQLite.

About Hosting Writebook

Writebook ships as one Docker image that runs the Rails app, its background jobs and Redis together, with its data in SQLite. This template runs the official, unmodified image behind Railway's HTTPS, on a volume mounted at /rails/storage. It fixes what breaks on Railway out of the box: volume permissions for the non-root app user, web and job process counts that would otherwise follow the host's CPU count, and the open first-run page that lets the first visitor become administrator. Your administrator account is created on first boot with a generated password.

Common Use Cases

Product manuals, user guides and internal documentation
Employee handbooks and team runbooks, shared privately with invited readers
Self-published books, short stories, essays or a family history
Course notes, picture-heavy guides or comics with full-page images

Dependencies for Writebook Hosting

Official Writebook image: ghcr.io/basecamp/writebook (pinned to 1.2.4)
Railway volume at /rails/storage for the SQLite database and uploads

Deployment Dependencies

Writebook source: https://github.com/basecamp/writebook
Writebook product page and manual: https://once.com/writebook
Template repository: https://github.com/jean82290/writebook-railway

Implementation Details

After the first deploy, open the service's public URL and sign in with the email you entered and the generated ADMIN_PASSWORD from the service's Variables tab. Change the password from your Writebook profile afterwards.

Variable	Purpose
ADMIN_EMAIL	Email of the administrator created on first boot
ADMIN_PASSWORD	Generated password for that account, used on first boot only
SECRET_KEY_BASE	Generated key that signs sessions
WEB_CONCURRENCY / JOB_CONCURRENCY	Process counts, 1 each to keep usage low
WRITEBOOK_VERSION	Official image tag; change it and redeploy to upgrade

This is a community template, not affiliated with 37signals.

Why Deploy Writebook 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 Writebook 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.