Publish to the Atlas

List your beacon on the public directory by flipping one toggle in its dashboard.

Listing is opt-in. Every beacon registers with Atlas during deployment — that single credential powers Minecraft sign-in and the heartbeat publisher — but it stays private by default and publishes nothing to the public directory until you turn listing on from the beacon's own dashboard.

There is no Atlas website account and nothing to paste. The credential lives in your beacon's .env, and you manage the listing from the host you control.

One credential, three jobs

A beacon registers once. The same BEACON_AUTH_CLIENT_ID / BEACON_AUTH_CLIENT_SECRET authenticates Minecraft login, publishes the heartbeat, and authorizes listing management. You never register a second time to list.

The workflow

Deploy the beacon

If you haven't yet, run a beacon. The beacon CLI registers it with Atlas automatically during deploy and writes the client credentials into .env.

To confirm registration on an existing host:

Check Atlas registration

beacon auth status

If login shows as unconfigured — for example on a beacon deployed before this step existed — register and restart once:

beacon auth register
beacon restart

Open the Atlas panel

Open the dashboard and go to the Atlas section:

Open the dashboard

beacon admin

The panel shows your client ID and redirect URI, the live publisher status, and the listing toggle. While listing is off, nothing about your server is public.

Turn on the public listing

Flip the Directory listing toggle on and apply. Set the public-facing profile — display name, description, tags, region, and Join policy — from the Profile editor in the same section.

Open is a public access change

Choosing Open is not just a directory label. When the listing is live, any visitor who completes Atlas Minecraft login from your public profile becomes an approved player and is queued for allowlist sync. Keep Gated if you still want invites, manual review, or a private friend list to control access.

Choose Gated when visitors should request access through the beacon's normal invite/review flow. Choose Open when the listing is meant to be a public server: Atlas links visitors straight to Minecraft login, and the beacon auto-approves the verified Minecraft identity after confirming the listing is still active, listed, and open.

Within a minute the heartbeat publisher sends your server's live state, and the listing appears on the public directory. Roster and activity sections stay off until you opt into them separately.

What gets published

Once listed, your beacon broadcasts public heartbeat data every 60 seconds: online status, player count, Minecraft version, loader, and installed mods or plugins, plus the profile fields you set. Atlas may also ping the advertised Minecraft address to corroborate that the server is reachable.

A heartbeat is one-way and read-only. It never gives Atlas access to your dashboard, allowlist, invite codes, world files, backups, RCON, or any server-control capability. See Privacy and heartbeats for the technical boundary.

One Atlas at a time

A beacon publishes to a single Atlas — the one set by BEACON_ATLAS_URL in its .env. beacon-mc.io is the first-party default; change it only when you intend to list with another Atlas deployment.

Pause, update, or rotate

Everything is managed from the Atlas dashboard panel on your host:

Pause — turn the listing toggle off. The directory entry disappears and the publisher goes quiet; the credential keeps working for Minecraft login.
Update — edit the profile fields, switch between gated and open joining, or change PUBLIC_APP_URL and run beacon auth sync to update the registered redirect URI.
Rotate — run beacon auth rotate-secret (then beacon restart) if the client secret is ever exposed.