A deploy button for your README, pointed at servers people own

The “Deploy to X” README badge is a familiar pattern for open-source maintainers — it’s the single lowest-friction way to turn “clone this and figure out how to run it” into one click. The part worth noticing about this specific version: the click lands on a server the visitor owns, not a shared account on a managed platform with its own metered bill attached to every instance someone spins up.

The whole implementation

[![Deploy to Railyard](https://app.railyard.run/deploy/badge)](https://app.railyard.run/deploy?repo=https://github.com/OWNER/REPO)

One markdown line, your own repo URL swapped in. No application process, no waiting for approval into a partner program, no separate account to register for your project specifically — it’s a URL pattern, not a product you integrate with.

What happens when someone clicks it

They sign in, or sign up if they’re new — then New app opens with the repository already read: framework detected, process types filled in, databases identified, documented environment variables already listed. The visitor isn’t starting from a blank form; they’re starting from everything Railyard could already figure out about the project, confirming or adjusting from there.

Two optional extras:

• &branch=NAME deploys a specific branch instead of the default — useful for a project that wants the button to launch a stable release branch rather than whatever main happens to be at the moment.
• Already in the template catalog? Use https://app.railyard.run/deploy?template=KEY instead of the repo URL — visitors get the catalog entry’s filled-in config (addons, documented setup notes) rather than raw auto-detection.

Why this matters for maintainers specifically, not end users

Every maintainer of a self-hostable project has had the same support thread: someone wants to try the project, gets partway through a manual setup, hits a wall on a database connection string or a missing environment variable, and gives up before ever seeing it run. A deploy button doesn’t replace good documentation — it replaces the step where documentation alone wasn’t enough to get someone from zero to a running instance, which is usually exactly where interested users are lost.

Full reference: Deploy to Railyard button.