🐳 Docker PaperMC Server

A general-purpose, OCI-compliant PaperMC server with streamlined and fine-grained customization options.

Available in Docker Hub.

💻 Demonstration (20 seconds)

📘 Usage

For a quick start, you can run the following command:

$ docker run -d -it \
    --name papermc-server \
    --restart=always \
    -p 25565:25565 \
    -e EULA=true \
    'djaytan/papermc-server:latest'

Note

Available tags can be found here.

Important

Setting the EULA environment variable to true implies that you have read and accepted the Minecraft EULA.

Tip

For detailed instructions on running the server, including configuration options and best practices, check out the user guide.

✨ Highlights

• 🏔️ Alpine-based image
• 🪶 Lightweight – ~125 MB
• 🧘 Minimalist – Includes only essential dependencies to reduce image size and surface area.
• 🧩 Customizable – Streamlined and fine-grained configuration options.
• 📚 Well-documented – Comprehensive and structured documentation covering features, configuration, and usage (link).
• 👤 UID-agnostic – Supports running the server with a custom/arbitrary UID (typically required when running container in OpenShift).
• 🔐 Rootless by default – Runs as a non-root user when no custom UID is specified.
• 🧬 Multi-architecture support – Built for linux/amd64 & linux/arm64 (additional OSs/architectures available on request).
• ☕ JRE 21 – Based on Eclipse Temurin.
  • Custom-built using jlink to minimize size.
  • Includes standard Java modules for broad plugin compatibility.
• 🩺 Healthcheck integration – Enhances resilience and high availability by continuously monitoring server health.
• 🔍 Frequent quality & security scans – Powered by SonarQube Cloud and Docker Scout.
• 🔄 Scheduled auto-updates – Bi-monthly rebuilds to incorporate upstream security patches and new PaperMC builds. Other updates are tracked and semi-automatically managed via Renovate.
• ☸️ Helm Chart – Easily deploy the server to Kubernetes using the reference Helm Chart.

🌍 Contributing

If you want to help us improve the project, you can learn more about ways to do so here.

Have a feature request? Don't hesitate to fill an issue!

🏷️ Versioning

This project follows Semantic Versioning.

The Docker tagging scheme is <mc-version>-v<image-version>-<timestamp-YYYYMMDD> (e.g. 1.21.4-v1.2.1-20250406)

🔒 Security Policy

In case you think having found a security vulnerability, please consult our Security Policy.

📄 Licence

This project inherits its licensing from the included upstream projects. As such, it is licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0 license, as it inherits from PaperMC, which in turn inherits it from the original Bukkit and CraftBukkit projects.

The distributed OCI image is based on the Alpine one. As with all Docker images, these likely also contain other software which may be under other licenses. Details about Alpine packages can be found here.

As for any pre-built image usage, it is the image user's responsibility to ensure that any use of this image complies with any relevant licenses for all software contained within.