Deploy and Host WYGIWYH on Railway

WYGIWYH ("What You Get Is What You Have") is an open-source, self-hosted personal finance tracker built around a simple rule: spend what you earn this month, and treat savings as untouchable. It tracks income and expenses across many accounts and currencies, with monthly and yearly overviews, net worth, rules, a DCA tracker and a REST API. This template deploys it ready for the internet: your admin account is created from the email you enter and a generated password, and there is no public sign-up. It is a community-maintained template and is not affiliated with the WYGIWYH project.

About Hosting WYGIWYH

WYGIWYH is a Django app. The official image runs gunicorn and a procrastinate background worker (recurring transactions, automatic exchange rates, cleanup) in one container, backed by PostgreSQL. This template deploys that image unmodified as one public web service plus a private PostgreSQL 15 with its own volume; transaction attachments are kept on a volume on web.

Running Django behind Railway's HTTPS proxy needs a few settings to line up, and they are all wired for you: the trusted CSRF origin and allowed hosts follow your Railway domain (including Railway's health-check host), the session cookie is Secure and the proxy's HTTPS header is trusted, and the secret key is generated. Railway mounts volumes as root while the image runs as a non-root user, so the start command hands the attachments volume to that user before starting the image's own process manager; the app never runs as root.

Common Use Cases

Track income, expenses and balances across bank accounts, cards, wallets and investments in one place
Manage money in several currencies, including custom ones for crypto or reward points, with automatic exchange rates
Follow monthly and yearly totals and net worth without the constraints of a budgeting app
Automate entries from other tools through the REST API or rules

Dependencies for WYGIWYH Hosting

PostgreSQL 15: included, on Railway's private network, with its own volume
Optional: an OIDC provider for single sign-on

Deployment Dependencies

WYGIWYH (AGPL-3.0): https://github.com/eitchtee/WYGIWYH
Template source and tests: https://github.com/youssefsiam38/wygiwyh-railway

Implementation Details

First sign-in: enter your email as ADMIN_EMAIL when deploying. After the deploy turns green, open the web service's Variables, copy ADMIN_PASSWORD, and sign in at the web service's domain. Change the password in WYGIWYH's settings; the variable is only used to create the account. Add other people under Users.

What's configured for you: the official eitchtee/wygiwyh image pinned by version and digest and used unmodified; database migrations and the admin account on every start (the admin is created once); the background worker; a generated SECRET_KEY and PostgreSQL password; URL, DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS and HTTPS_ENABLED for Railway's domain; a health check on /login/; volumes for the database and for attachments.

Optional settings on web: OIDC_CLIENT_NAME, OIDC_CLIENT_ID, OIDC_CLIENT_SECRET, OIDC_SERVER_URL for single sign-on (set OIDC_ALLOW_SIGNUP=false unless everyone at your provider should get an account); ENABLE_SOFT_DELETE and KEEP_DELETED_ENTRIES_FOR; WEB_CONCURRENCY, TASK_WORKERS; TZ. If you add a custom domain, append it to DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS and URL.

Tested on a live deployment of this template over HTTPS: admin sign-in through Django's CSRF-protected form, refused anonymous and wrong-password access, no sign-up page, creating a currency, an account, transactions and a file attachment, and all of it surviving a redeploy.

Why Deploy WYGIWYH 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 WYGIWYH 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.