Deploy and Host Serverless Minecraft with Proxy on Railway

Serverless Minecraft with Proxy runs a Paper Minecraft server that sleeps when empty and wakes when a player joins. A lightweight Rust proxy holds the public port, answers server-list pings without waking the server, and boots it on the first real login, so you only pay for compute while people are actually playing.

About Hosting Serverless Minecraft with Proxy

A Minecraft server normally runs around the clock, billing compute even when nobody is online. Scaling it to zero sounds simple but breaks in practice, because Minecraft clients ping every server on their multiplayer list every few seconds, and a plain TCP proxy treats those pings as real traffic. This template solves that: the proxy answers pings itself and wakes the server only on a genuine login. Hosting also needs a volume for the world, which is included, and Serverless toggled on manually for the Minecraft service, since Railway does not allow that setting to be baked into a template.

Common Use Cases

• A small private survival server for friends who play a few evenings a week
• Seasonal or event servers that sit idle for long stretches between sessions
• Modpack and plugin testing servers that only need to run while you are working on them
• Community servers with predictable off-hours, such as overnight or weekdays
• Hosting a world for a group in another timezone without paying for the gap

Dependencies for Serverless Minecraft with Proxy Hosting

• itzg/docker-minecraft-server, running Paper by default
• A custom Rust wake proxy built on Tokio, included in this repository
• Railway Serverless (app sleeping) enabled on the Minecraft service
• A Railway volume attached to the Minecraft service for world storage
• Railway TCP proxy on the proxy service for public networking

Deployment Dependencies

• itzg/docker-minecraft-server documentation
• Paper
• Minecraft EULA, which you must accept via the EULA variable
• Railway Serverless documentation

Implementation Details

Enable Serverless on the minecraft service after deploying. This is what saves the money, and it has to be done by hand: go to the service's settings > Deploy > Serverless and toggle Enable Serverless. Leave it off for the proxy service, which must stay running to hold the public port, answer pings, and wake the backend.

Two services are deployed:

Resources. The proxy idles at around 3 MB of RAM, so set it to the lowest CPU and memory allocation available. Give the minecraft service 1 vCPU and as much RAM as you want the server to have. Keep that allocation comfortably above the JVM heap set by the MEMORY variable, since the JVM needs a few hundred MB on top of the heap.

Idle. The proxy answers server-list pings itself with your offline MOTD, echoing the client's protocol version so it never shows as incompatible. The Minecraft container is never contacted, so it stays asleep.

First join. The proxy gives the backend 5 seconds. If it isn't up, it starts the boot in the background and disconnects the player with a "server is starting, rejoin in a few seconds" message. A typical server takes around 20 seconds to boot from sleep, and Minecraft's own login timeout is about 30 seconds, so a clear message plus a quick rejoin is far more reliable than holding the connection open.

Playing. Joins proxy straight through, with encryption, mods, and plugins passing untouched. The proxy sends a real status handshake every 60 seconds so the server can't sleep mid-session, which also refreshes a cached copy of the backend's MOTD, player cap, and icon.

Back to sleep. After the last player leaves, the proxy shows the online MOTD for SLEEP_TIMEOUT_SECS from that cache, never probing, so the container's idle timer runs down undisturbed.

The proxy is a fork of a simpler one, with a lot of improvements added on top. The original forwards raw TCP without reading it, so it can't tell a server-list ping from a real join. This fork speaks the Minecraft protocol.

It also enforces one live session per username so reconnects never trigger "You logged in from another location", supports rich MOTDs (& color codes, hex, and text tags), answers legacy pre-1.7 pings, and drains active sessions for 25 seconds on redeploy so players aren't cut off mid-write.

Proxy variables:

Minecraft service variables are documented in minecraft.env.example.

Things to know:

• The first join of a session is a rejoin. Waking takes around 20 seconds, longer than the client will wait, so the first player gets a "starting up" message and connects on their second attempt. Everyone after that joins normally.
• The backend sees the proxy's IP, not the player's. IP bans, geo plugins, and connection logs all show the proxy. There's no PROXY-protocol support.
• Your world is on a volume. It survives sleeping, waking, and redeploys. Don't detach it.
• SLEEP_TIMEOUT_SECS doesn't control sleeping. It only controls which MOTD is displayed. The container's own idle timer decides when it stops.

Why Deploy Serverless Minecraft with Proxy 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 with Proxy 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.