Deploy and Host ElasticMQ on Railway

ElasticMQ is a message queue server that speaks the Amazon SQS API. Any AWS SDK or the AWS CLI can create queues, send and receive messages, and use visibility timeouts and dead-letter queues against it. It suits services that are written for SQS but should run without an AWS account.

About Hosting ElasticMQ

This template runs the official native build softwaremill/elasticmq-native:1.7.1 as one private service. ElasticMQ has no authentication, so the template gives it no public domain: other services in the same Railway project reach it at http://elasticmq.railway.internal:9324 over IPv4 or IPv6. Queue definitions and messages are stored on a Railway volume, so they survive restarts and redeploys. Queue URLs returned by the API use the private hostname, which is what your SDK needs. Any access key and secret are accepted. The whole server uses very little memory and fits the Hobby plan.

Common Use Cases

Running code written for Amazon SQS on Railway without an AWS account
A simple job queue between a web service and background workers
Testing SQS integrations against a queue you fully control

Dependencies for ElasticMQ Hosting

softwaremill/elasticmq-native:1.7.1 (official GraalVM native image)
A Railway volume at /data for queues and messages

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Service	Source	Networking	Storage
elasticmq	`softwaremill/elasticmq-native:1.7.1`	private only, port 9324	volume at `/data`

Variable	Default	Purpose
`ELASTICMQ_HOST`	`${{RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}`	Host used in the queue URLs ElasticMQ returns
`AWS_REGION`	`us-east-1`	Region shown in queue ARNs
`ELASTICMQ_ACCOUNT_ID`	`000000000000`	Account ID in queue URLs and ARNs

Notes:

Point your SDK at http://elasticmq.railway.internal:9324 with any access key and secret.
The start command passes settings as -D options; it binds to :: and stores queues in /data/queues.conf and messages in an H2 database.
Do not add a public domain unless something in front of it checks credentials: ElasticMQ itself accepts every request.

This is a community-maintained deployment package and does not imply affiliation with or endorsement by SoftwareMill or the ElasticMQ project.

Why Deploy ElasticMQ 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 ElasticMQ 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.