Self-hosting Hermes Agent on Railway: the dashboard that refuses to open unauthenticated
Full disclosure up front: I maintain a Railway template for this and get a kickback if you deploy through it. That's the whole pitch — everything below is the actual writeup. I've been poking at the self-improving-agent space (OpenClaw and friends) and wanted to try Nous Research's Hermes Agent without handing it API keys to a hosted box. It's genuinely interesting — it accumulates skills over…
The article discusses the challenges of self-hosting Hermes Agent on Railway, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for deploying software. The Hermes Agent is an open-source self-improving agent developed by Nous Research. The author, who maintains a Railway template for this purpose, highlights three key issues that are not immediately apparent in the upstream documentation.
Firstly, the dashboard of the Hermes Agent fails to open unauthenticated. After June 2026, the dashboard refuses to bind to a non-loopback address without a registered auth provider. If the password variable is left empty, the dashboard doesn't open at all, and the HERMES_DASHBOARD_INSECURE variable is accepted but ignored. The author addresses this issue by generating a password during the first boot if none is provided, persisting it to the volume, and printing it in the deploy logs.
Secondly, Railway injects its own PORT value during runtime. The Hermes Agent's dashboard defaults to port 9119, but Railway sets PORT=8080, which is not shown in the variables list. The agent's dashboard fails with a 502 error when pointed at this port, as Hermes listens on 9119, while nothing is routed to 8080. The author resolves this issue by having the entrypoint read the $PORT variable and set HERMES_DASHBOARD_PORT accordingly before the dashboard starts.
Lastly, the volume where the agent stores its skills and session state is not optional. Persistent storage is crucial for the self-improving nature of Hermes Agent. Without a volume, redeployment wipes the agent's learned skills, defeating the purpose of running it. The author emphasizes that this is not a criticism of Hermes but rather the gap between running on one's own box and running on a platform that alters settings and terminates containers during redeployment.
The image for the Hermes Agent is available on Docker Hub as nousresearch/hermes-agent. The author has created a wrapper (entrypoint + Dockerfile) specifically for Railway deployment at bon5co/hermes-agent-railway, which automates the three issues discussed, including generating a dashboard password during the first boot.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
