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Deploy on Railway

Railway is a good fit for ZAR: it provisions Postgres and Redis, injects their connection strings, and gives you a public HTTPS domain for the webhook. The repo includes railway.toml, nixpacks.toml, and a start.py entrypoint that reads Railway’s $PORT.

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1. Create the service

  1. Create a new Railway project from your copy of the ZAR source (it includes railway.toml, nixpacks.toml, and start.py).
  2. Railway detects the Dockerfile / Nixpacks build and starts a web service.

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2. Add Postgres and Redis

Add the PostgreSQL and Redis plugins to the project. Railway injects:
  • DATABASE_URL (a postgres://… URL) — ZAR uses the async Postgres driver.
  • REDIS_URL.
You don’t need to set these by hand once the plugins are attached.

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3. Set environment variables

In the service Variables, set at least: 
GITHUB_APP_ID=...
GITHUB_WEBHOOK_SECRET=...
GITHUB_PRIVATE_KEY=-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n...    # paste the full PEM
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
APP_ENV=production
SESSION_SECRET=...        # python -c "import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex(32))"
On Railway, prefer GITHUB_PRIVATE_KEY (the inline PEM) over GITHUB_PRIVATE_KEY_PATH — there’s no .pem file to mount. See Environment variables for the rest (limits, OAuth, SMTP, billing).

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4. Deploy and get the domain

Deploy. Once it’s live, open the service Settings → Networking and generate a public domain (e.g. https://your-app.up.railway.app).

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5. Point GitHub at the webhook

Set your GitHub App’s Webhook URL to: 
https://your-app.up.railway.app/github/webhook
(Note the /github prefix.)

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6. Verify

  • Health check: GET https://your-app.up.railway.app/healthz → {"ok": true}.
  • Railway’s healthcheck should pass against /healthz.
  • Install the App on a repo and open a test PR, or use the dashboard’s Send test webhook.

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Notes

  • The start command resolves to uvicorn app.main:app bound to Railway’s $PORT.
  • Use Postgres (auto-injected) rather than SQLite for anything beyond a quick trial.
  • If you change the domain later, update the GitHub App’s Webhook URL to match.

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Next steps