Deploy and Host Lavalink on Railway

Lavalink is a standalone audio-sending node for Discord bots: your bot asks it to load and play a track, and it does all the fetching, decoding and opus encoding, so the bot process never blocks on audio. This template runs Lavalink 4.2.2 as a single service with a working YouTube source, a password that is generated for you, and a heap sized to whatever plan you deploy it on.

About Hosting Lavalink

Lavalink is a JVM service that holds a WebSocket connection to your bot and a UDP voice connection to Discord for every playing guild, so it wants steady CPU and RAM rather than disk. It keeps no state on disk — sessions and players live in memory — which is why this template ships no volume and no database.

Three things usually go wrong when it is hosted from a generic template, and this one fixes all three before you see it:

The password. Lavalink accepts an empty lavalink.server.password, and an empty password is not "auth off" in a way you would notice: a request with no Authorization header gets 401, but a request whose Authorization header is empty gets 200 — the node is open, and anybody who finds the URL can stream audio on your bill. Here the password is generated at deploy time, and the container refuses to start if it is blank.
YouTube. The built-in YouTube source is deprecated and the plugin has to be current; on the version most templates pin, every YouTube lookup returns "Something went wrong while looking up the track." This image bakes youtube-plugin 1.18.2 in, with an explicit client list, and no jar is downloaded at boot.
Memory. A hardcoded -Xmx768m applies whether you run 1 GB or 32 GB. The entrypoint reads the container's cgroup limit and gives the JVM 70% of it.

Common Use Cases

Discord music bots, including sharded bots served by one node
24/7 radio, playlist or lofi-stream playback
Multiple bots sharing a single audio node
Audio filtering (equalizer, timescale, karaoke, rotation) offloaded from the bot process

Dependencies for Lavalink Hosting

A Discord bot that speaks the Lavalink v4 protocol (Lavalink4NET, lavalink-client, Lavalink.py, Riffy, Shoukaku, …)

Deployment Dependencies

Lavalink: https://lavalink.dev
Lavalink source: https://github.com/lavalink-devs/Lavalink
youtube-source plugin: https://github.com/lavalink-devs/youtube-source
Template image source: https://github.com/bon5co/lavalink-railway

Why Deploy Lavalink 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 Lavalink 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.

After deploying

Copy LAVALINK_SERVER_PASSWORD from the service's Variables tab.
Point your bot at the public domain: host = your *.up.railway.app domain, port 443, secure/TLS on, password = the value above.
Check it: curl -H "Authorization: " https:///v4/info.

Sources, filters, buffer sizes and YouTube clients are baked into the image, so the deploy form asks for nothing. Any of them can still be overridden with the usual LAVALINK_SERVER_* environment variables.