Deploy and Host Serverless Minecraft Server on Railway

You must enable serverless yourself. Click the minecraft-server service, go to settings and go down to serverless, enable it and deploy

Minecraft Server using itzg/minecraft-server and Haproxy

See https://docker-minecraft-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/variables/ for configuration

Supports Forge, Fabric, Vanilla, Paper, Bukkit, Spigot, Quilt and more!

By hosting a Minecraft server on Railway and enabling the Serverless option, your service costs nothing while idle by sleeping.

About Hosting Serverless Minecraft Server

Maintaining a Minecraft has never been easier. Haproxy holds TCP request when your server is waking up from sleep and connects players to the server once ready.

You can customize nearly anything you normally could on a Minecraft server. See https://docker-minecraft-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/variables/ for more info

Common Use Cases

You don't play 24/7. The point of enabling serverless is the server only starts when you try to join and stops after 10 minutes of no activity
Minimal budget. Hosting a smallish vanilla server that you play a couple of times a week could very easily cost under $2, maybe even $1
Minimal maintenance needed. When you change the environment variable for example the VERSION and just redeploy, the new version is automatically downloaded and you don't have to do anything

Upload existing world

You may also upload your existing world to the /data volume, but that requires a little more.

Deploy the Filebrowser template in the same project
Add USE_VOLUME_ROOT=1 env variable to Filebrowser
Disconnect the /data volume from the Minecraft server by right clicking and press "Disconnect volume"
Delete the default Filebrowser volume
Attach the Minecraft server volume to Filebrowser at /Data
Open Filebrowser and upload your server folder
Move all contents from the uploaded folder to the ".." path, root.
Disconnect the volume and attach it back to minecraft-server
Deploy

Dependencies for Serverless Minecraft Server Hosting

Docker image itzg/minecraft-server Docker image haproxy

Deployment Dependencies

https://github.com/itzg/docker-minecraft-server https://hub.docker.com/_/haproxy

Why Deploy Serverless Minecraft Server 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 Serverless Minecraft Server 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.