Deploy and Host hooka with Railway

hooka is a self-hosted, Telegram-first notification bus for people and AI agents. You publish to topics over HTTP; each topic's routes deliver the message to Telegram chats, webhooks, or SMS, and every message is stored with its delivery outcome, so you get history, search, retries, and dead letters.

About Hosting hooka

This template runs three services: hooka (the Go server, hookad), PostgreSQL with a persistent volume, and the Next.js dashboard. The only value you provide is a Telegram bot token from @BotFather. Railway generates the master API key, the dashboard passphrase, and the cookie secret at deploy time. The dashboard talks to the server over Railway's private network, and Telegram updates arrive by long-polling, so no webhook setup is needed. Database migrations run automatically on startup.

Common Use Cases

• Send deploy, CI, and monitoring alerts to Telegram chats and forum threads
• Give AI agents a durable message bus with history, streams, and an MCP server
• Accept third-party webhooks (GitHub, Alertmanager) through revocable capability URLs
• Turn Telegram commands into events for your own small apps and bots
• Schedule reminders and collect answers with native forms

Dependencies for hooka Hosting

• A Telegram bot token (create one with @BotFather)
• PostgreSQL (included in this template)

Deployment Dependencies

• Source and docs: https://github.com/guzus/hooka
• Railway walkthrough: https://github.com/guzus/hooka/blob/main/docs/DEPLOY_RAILWAY.md
• Telegram BotFather: https://t.me/BotFather

Implementation Details

After deploying, find API_KEY on the hooka service's Variables tab and publish your first message:

curl -X POST "https://<your-hooka-domain>/publish/hello" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"title":"hooka is live","text":"Sent from Railway"}'

Why Deploy hooka 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 hooka 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.