Deploy and Host Telegram Bot API Server on Railway

The official telegram-bot-api server, self-hosted. Running your own local Bot API server removes the limits the public api.telegram.org endpoint imposes on every bot: downloads go from 20 MB to unlimited, uploads from 50 MB to 2 GB, webhooks can point at any local IP address, and files are served straight off this server's own disk instead of being re-downloaded from Telegram.

This template runs the official server (aiogram/telegram-bot-api) with --local enabled, the working directory on a persistent volume, and the HTTP port wired to Railway's injected $PORT so the public URL works with no extra configuration.

About Hosting Telegram Bot API Server

The server is a long-running C++ process that keeps every bot's session in RAM and writes downloaded and uploaded media to disk. That makes it a poor fit for anything ephemeral: without a volume, every file a bot has downloaded disappears on redeploy, and the working directory has to survive restarts for local-mode file paths to remain valid. This template mounts /var/lib/telegram-bot-api as a volume for exactly that reason.

TELEGRAM_LOCAL is enabled by default here. Local mode is what unlocks the large upload limit and local file paths; the upstream image leaves it off, so a stock deploy looks like it is working while still behaving like the public endpoint.

Why Deploy Telegram Bot API Server on Railway

Railway runs the container, gives it a TLS public domain, and keeps the volume attached across deploys — which is the whole operational requirement of this service. The HTTP port is injected, and this image passes it through to the server's --http-port flag, so there is no port mismatch to debug and no reverse proxy to configure.

Common Use Cases

Bots that send or receive files larger than the public API allows (video, archives, datasets).
Bots that download media at volume and want it served from their own disk.
Bots that need webhooks on a private or non-standard address.

Dependencies for Telegram Bot API Server

TELEGRAM_API_ID and TELEGRAM_API_HASH, obtained free at https://my.telegram.org (Apps). These identify your application to Telegram; the server refuses to start without them.

Deployment Dependencies

https://my.telegram.org — create an application to obtain the API ID and hash.
https://core.telegram.org/bots/api#using-a-local-bot-api-server — upstream documentation.

Honest limits

The server cannot start without the two credentials above, which belong to the person deploying it, so this template's live verification covers the container, the volume, the port wiring and local mode — not a paired bot.