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[ESSAY]
Deploying a Self-Hosted Social Scheduler on Railway
Multi-service deploy on Railway — app, Postgres, Redis — with sane defaults.
[ essay ]
Self-hosted schedulers replace SaaS buffers when you want RSS-driven cross-posting under your control.
Topology (typical): web app + PostgreSQL + Redis on a PaaS. Pin application version explicitly — auto-upgrades break OAuth and migrations.
Critical steps
- Deploy template or compose equivalent services
- Set public URL env vars after networking exposes the correct port
- Generate strong JWT secret; disable open registration after admin account exists
- Connect OAuth per platform in provider settings — store secrets in host env, not repo
RSS flow: canonical blog feed → scheduler → platforms. Canonical URL always points to your site.
Cost awareness: hobby tier suffices for personal volume; watch database storage growth from media uploads.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.