alist-railway

Deployment image for AList on Railway, built for the published Railway template.

One layer over the upstream xhofe/alist:latest image. AList itself is fully configurable from environment variables — database, port, site URL, admin password, logging — so this repo exists for exactly one thing the environment cannot express: AList stores its search index backend in a settings row, not in a config file, so a Meilisearch service wired up by variables alone would never actually be used.

railway-entrypoint.sh therefore:

• creates /opt/alist/data before AList looks for config.json there, plus an empty /opt/alist/data/local for the deployment's first Local storage — AList's Local driver refuses a root folder that does not exist, and the container offers no shell in which to create one, and
• once, in the background after the server is answering, signs in with the deployment's admin credentials and switches search_index to meilisearch.

That step is guarded three ways so it can never revert a choice an operator has made: it runs only while the setting still holds AList's shipped default (none), only while no marker file exists on the volume, and only when MEILISEARCH_HOST is set. It then execs the image's own /entrypoint.sh, so the upstream umask, chown and privilege handling are untouched.

Railway configuration

Port	5244 (PORT and HTTP_PORT)
Volume	/opt/alist/data
Health check	/ping
Database	DB_TYPE=postgres plus the discrete DB_HOST/DB_PORT/DB_USER/DB_PASS/DB_NAME/DB_SSL_MODE variables
Search	MEILISEARCH_HOST, MEILISEARCH_API_KEY
First admin	ALIST_ADMIN_PASSWORD, read only while AList's user table is empty
Logging	LOG_ENABLE=false, which keeps AList's log on stdout instead of a file on the volume

AList's own entrypoint runs alist server --no-prefix, so its configuration environment variables carry no ALIST_ prefix (HTTP_PORT, DB_TYPE, SITE_URL, …). ALIST_ADMIN_PASSWORD is the exception: AList reads that one directly, under that exact name, whatever the prefix setting.

The image is the plain latest variant deliberately, not -aria2 or -aio: those bundle an aria2 daemon with BitTorrent support, which Railway's fair use policy does not allow.

Licence

AList is AGPL-3.0. This repository carries only the deployment wrapper.