Railway

Railway builds the Dockerfile straight from GitHub, gives you HTTPS and WebSockets out of the box and can attach a persistent volume. This guide sets up your own Oyla instance there, with your own domain. Expect to pay about $5 per month on Railway’s Hobby plan.

Before you start

• A Railway account.
• The Oyla repository in a GitHub account that Railway can access. A fork of mftnakrsu/oyla works and lets you decide when to take updates.
• For a custom domain: access to your domain’s DNS settings.

1. Create the service

1. In Railway, create a new project and choose Deploy from GitHub repo.
2. Pick the Oyla repository.

Railway finds the Dockerfile and builds it. The railway.json in the repository tells Railway to use the Dockerfile and sets the healthcheck path to /api/health, so a deploy only goes live once the server answers.

You don’t need to set PORT: Railway provides it and Oyla listens on it.

2. Add a volume

Without a volume, every deploy starts with an empty database.

1. Add a Volume to the Oyla service.
2. Set the mount path to /data.

The image stores its database at /data/oyla.db, so nothing else needs to change.

3. Set the variables

In the service’s Variables tab, add:

Variable	Value	Why
OYLA_TRUST_PROXY	true	Railway’s proxy sits in front of Oyla. This makes rate limits use each visitor’s address instead of the proxy’s.
OYLA_CREATE_PASSWORD	a long password	Optional. Only people who know it can create presentations. Joining stays open.

Variable changes take effect with the next deploy; deploy the changes when Railway offers it.

You don’t need RAILWAY_RUN_UID. Railway mounts volumes owned by root; the image’s entrypoint hands /data to its unprivileged node user at start and runs the server as that user.

4. Add your domain

Railway can generate a *.up.railway.app address, which is handy for a first test. For your own domain, for example oyla.example.com:

1. Open the service’s Settings and go to Networking.
2. Add a custom domain and enter the host name.
3. Railway shows a CNAME record. Create that record at your DNS provider: the name is the subdomain (oyla), the value is the target Railway shows.
4. Wait until Railway shows the domain as active. It issues the HTTPS certificate on its own.

The presenter screen shows whichever host it is opened on, so open it on your custom domain to have that domain in Go to … and enter … and in the QR code.

5. Check the deployment

• https://your-domain/api/health answers {"status":"ok"}.
• Create a presentation, open the presenter screen, and join from your phone over mobile data rather than the same Wi-Fi, so you test the public path.
• Redeploy once and confirm the presentation is still there. If it’s gone, the volume isn’t mounted at /data.

Updates

Railway redeploys when the connected branch changes. With a fork, sync it with the original repository to get a new version. The data stays on the volume, and database migrations run when the new version starts.

Other hosts

Railway is one option. Oyla runs on any host that:

• builds or runs a Docker image (or Node.js 24),
• supports WebSockets, and
• offers a persistent disk for /data.

Fly.io, Render, a small VPS with Docker and a home server behind a reverse proxy all fit. Whatever you pick, run a single instance, give it HTTPS, and set OYLA_TRUST_PROXY to the number of proxies in front of it. The Docker page has reverse proxy examples.