Deploy and Host Zot on Railway

Zot is a vendor-neutral, OCI-native container image registry from the CNCF. It stores Docker and OCI images, Helm charts and other OCI artifacts, and works with docker, podman, oras, helm and Kubernetes. A single binary provides the registry, a web UI, search, deduplication and garbage collection.

About Hosting Zot

This template deploys Zot v2.1.21 from a small public wrapper image that builds on the official binary, pinned by digest. On every start it generates the login file from environment variables, so the admin password is set at deploy time and rotating it is a redeploy. Images are stored on a Railway volume with deduplication and garbage collection on. Anonymous pulls are off by default; set ZOT_ANONYMOUS_READ=true to make images public. Push and pull go through the Railway domain over HTTPS. Plan storage for your images: the Hobby volume limit is 5 GB.

Common Use Cases

A private registry for CI-built images deployed to Railway or Kubernetes
Hosting Helm charts and other OCI artifacts next to your images
Mirroring base images your team depends on

Dependencies for Zot Hosting

aalfath/zot-railway-template (public wrapper around ghcr.io/project-zot/zot-linux-amd64:v2.1.21)
A Railway volume at /var/lib/registry for image storage

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Service	Source	Networking	Storage
zot	`aalfath/zot-railway-template`	public domain on 5000	volume at `/var/lib/registry`

docker login  -u admin
docker tag my-app:latest /my-app:1.0
docker push /my-app:1.0

Variable	Default	Purpose
`ZOT_ADMIN_USER` / `ZOT_ADMIN_PASSWORD`	`admin` / generated	Admin login
`ZOT_EXTRA_USERS`	unset	Extra users, `name:password` separated by spaces (read, push, delete)
`ZOT_ANONYMOUS_READ`	`false`	Allow anonymous pulls

Notes:

CVE scanning is not enabled; it downloads a large vulnerability database and needs more memory.
Railway's proxy limits request size and duration; very large layers may need several attempts.

This is a community-maintained deployment package and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by the Zot project or its maintainers.

Why Deploy Zot 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 Zot 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.