Deploy Jaeger

Deploy and Host Jaeger on Railway

Jaeger is an open-source, CNCF-graduated distributed tracing platform. It collects OpenTelemetry traces from your services and lets you search them, follow requests across services and find slow or failing calls. Jaeger v2 is built on the OpenTelemetry Collector, so any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces to it directly.

About Hosting Jaeger

This template deploys Jaeger v2.21.0 with persistent Badger storage on a volume, plus a Caddy gateway that is the only public entry point. The Jaeger UI is protected by a username and a generated password. OTLP/HTTP trace ingestion at /v1/traces requires a generated bearer token. Services on Railway can instead send traces over the private network with OTLP gRPC (4317) or HTTP (4318), with no token. Traces are kept for 7 days by default. Disk use grows with trace volume, so watch the volume size on the Hobby plan (5 GB). Jaeger is a single node and runs as root so it can write to the volume.

Common Use Cases

• Tracing requests across microservices on Railway to find latency and errors
• Debugging slow API endpoints, database calls and queue consumers with OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation
• A self-hosted, low-cost tracing backend for staging or small production systems

Dependencies for Jaeger Hosting

• jaegertracing/jaeger:2.21.0 (official image) with a volume for Badger storage
• caddy:2.11.4-alpine (official image) as the authenticated public gateway
• An OpenTelemetry SDK or Collector in your application

Deployment Dependencies

• Jaeger documentation
• Jaeger v2.21.0 release notes
• OpenTelemetry OTLP exporter configuration
• Railway volumes

Implementation Details

Send traces from a service on Railway (private network, no token):

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=${{jaeger.JAEGER_OTLP_HTTP_ENDPOINT}}
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=my-service

Send traces from outside Railway (through the gateway, with the token):

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT=https:///v1/traces
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_HEADERS=Authorization=Bearer 
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf

Notes:

• The gateway only routes OTLP/HTTP (/v1/traces). OTLP gRPC (4317) is available on the private network only.
• The Jaeger UI has no login of its own, which is why it is kept private behind the Caddy gateway.
• Jaeger runs with RAILWAY_RUN_UID=0 because the image user cannot write to Railway's root-owned volume.
• Jaeger v2.21.0 removed the old v1 HTTP query endpoints. Use the UI, or the /api/v3/... endpoints through the gateway.
• For larger or multi-node setups, switch JAEGER_CONFIG to an Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Cassandra or ClickHouse backend.

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

Why Deploy Jaeger 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 Jaeger 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.