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Deploying CodeFox

Frontend on Vercel, backend on Railway. The backend cannot be serverless: an agent turn streams for minutes and a function's execution limit cuts it off.

Everything below is already created. What is left is the variables marked SET THIS — they are credentials or account-specific, so they are not in the repo.

Backend — Railway

Project codefox, service backend, deploying CodeFox-Repo/codefox@main.

Already set:

Variable Value Why
NODE_ENV production Closes sign-up, quiets logging
PORT 8080
JWT_SECRET, JWT_REFRESH generated
SALT_ROUNDS 10 Must match what existing hashes used
DB_SYNCHRONIZE true Remove after the first boot. There are no migrations, so the first deploy needs this to create the schema. Left on, TypeORM will drop a column to match an entity.
MAIL_ENABLED false Accounts are confirmed on creation
SANDBOX_PROVIDER host See "Before opening sign-up"
DATABASE_URL ${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}

Also worth setting:

Variable Default if unset Why
FRONTEND_URL http://localhost:3000 Every password-reset and email-confirmation link is built from this. Unset on a real deploy, the link points at localhost — a dead link whose only symptom is a user who cannot get back in.
MAX_PROJECTS_PER_USER 20 Per-account project cap; create and fork share it.
MAX_TURNS_PER_USER 3 Concurrent agent turns per account. The per-project queue does not bound this on its own.

SET THIS — the agent will not run without it:

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...

The agent is the real Claude Code CLI driven through the AI SDK harness, so it needs an Anthropic-compatible endpoint. Two other options:

  • OpenRouter. It does serve an Anthropic-style /v1/messages (verified: a bogus path there returns 404, that one returns a JSON 401), so ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 plus your OpenRouter key in ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is worth trying. Untested against the CLI's full protocol use — streaming, tool calls, system prompts — so try it before relying on it.
  • Your own proxy, if it is reachable from Railway. The local 127.0.0.1 one in .env is not.

LLM_API_KEY (any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, OpenRouter by default) is optional and separate: it powers the Enhance button, project auto-naming, and chats with no project. Without it those three degrade; the agent is unaffected.

SET THIS if you want projects to survive a deploy:

CODEFOX_DATA_DIR=/data

...and mount a Railway volume at /data. Generated projects, uploaded media and the SQLite file all live there. Without it a redeploy replaces the container filesystem and every project is gone.

Frontend — Vercel

Project codefox, connected to the same GitHub repo. Set these to the backend's public Railway domain:

NEXT_PUBLIC_BACKEND_URL=https://<backend>.up.railway.app
NEXT_PUBLIC_GRAPHQL_URL=https://<backend>.up.railway.app/graphql
NEXT_PUBLIC_GRAPHQL_WS_URL=wss://<backend>.up.railway.app/graphql

Optional: NEXT_PUBLIC_GOOGLE_OAUTH_ENABLED=true — without it both auth modals hide the Google button rather than bounce you to a Google error page.

Accounts

Sign-up is closed in production, so create accounts directly:

node scripts/create-user.mjs <email> <password> [username]

It goes through the same bcrypt hashing the login path verifies against — a hand-written SQL row has to reproduce that hash format exactly or the account simply cannot log in.

Before opening sign-up

SANDBOX_PROVIDER=host runs the agent in a scoped working directory with the backend process's privileges. That is fine while every account is one you created, and hands the server to anyone who registers if sign-up is open.

Opening it up needs SANDBOX_PROVIDER=vercel, which puts each session in a real microVM. The provider works — one persistent named sandbox per project, files verified to survive between sessions — but the file tree, editor, download and fork still read the backend's own disk, so a remote session shows an empty project. That plumbing is the remaining piece.