melonJS

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 920 words

Hosting a melonJS game is hosting a folder. The engine compiles your game into an index.html, a JavaScript bundle and an assets directory, and any static file server, including the one already in front of your homelab, serves it with no runtime, no database and no process to monitor. That property is why a game engine belongs on a self-hosting site at all, and melonJS is one of the lighter engines that gives it to you. What follows is where it sits in a stack, what it needs from you, and the honest case for picking PixiJS or Phaser instead.

What it is, and what it is not

melonJS is an MIT-licensed 2D engine written in modern JavaScript, in development since 2011, with 6,382 GitHub stars. It renders through WebGL with a Canvas fallback, has a sprite and animation system, a tile-based physics and collision layer, an entity model, audio through Web Audio, and a plugin system for extending the renderer or input. Its distinctive feature is first-class support for the Tiled map editor: you draw levels in Tiled, export TMX or JSON, and the engine loads them with collision layers and object entities intact. It is a library you npm install, not an editor you open; there is no scene editor, no visual scripting, no built-in asset pipeline beyond a preloader. If you want an editor, ct.js wraps a similar workflow in a desktop app, and GameMaker or Construct are the commercial versions of that idea.

Where it sits in a stack

A typical melonJS project looks like any other front-end build. The official boilerplate gives you a Vite or webpack config, a src/ with your game code as ES modules, an assets/ directory, and npm run build, which produces a dist/ folder of a few megabytes. That folder is the deployable artefact. Build it in CI on your Gitea or Forgejo instance if you like, or on your laptop, and copy the result to a web root. Nothing on the server runs your code; the player's browser does. Memory on the server side is whatever the static server uses, which is why the 128 MB figure is really a rounding error.

The one thing to configure is the server. With Caddy:

games.example.com {
    root * /srv/games/mygame
    file_server
    encode zstd gzip
    header /assets/* Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable"
}

Vite fingerprints bundle filenames, so long cache lifetimes on the asset directory are safe, and compression matters because a game bundle with a physics engine is a few hundred kilobytes before assets. Serve over HTTPS; Web Audio and some input APIs behave better in secure contexts, and Caddy makes that automatic.

Multiplayer is not included

melonJS has no networking layer. A single-player game is complete as static files. Anything multiplayer means writing a server: a WebSocket process in Node, Go or whatever you prefer, with its own state model, and then you are self-hosting a real service with a port, a process manager and reconnect logic. Engines in the game engines category that ship a server binary, such as Luanti or OpenRA, solve a different problem, and if multiplayer is the point, start from one of those or from a networking library rather than expecting melonJS to grow one.

When to pick Phaser instead

Phaser is the larger 2D HTML5 engine by a wide margin: more tutorials, more Stack Overflow answers, more plugins, a bigger Discord, and a paid editor if you want one. For a first browser game, that support surface is the safer bet, and I would not argue against it. melonJS wins on 3 things: a smaller, more readable codebase you can actually step through when something breaks; the tightest Tiled integration of any JS engine, which for tile-based games removes a whole category of glue code; and a leaner bundle. If you already think in Tiled layers and want an engine that does not fight you, melonJS is the better fit. If you are choosing an engine to learn game programming, Phaser's community will answer your questions faster. Both produce the same deployable: a folder of static files.

The self-hoster's actual workflow

Mine, for a small tile-based game: Tiled for levels with a collision layer and an objects layer for spawns; melonJS entities mapped to Tiled object types; assets as sprite sheets packed with TexturePacker or the free alternatives; npm run build on push via a CI runner; rsync of dist/ to the web root; Caddy serving it under a subdomain with the header block above. Player saves live in localStorage on the client, so there is no server-side state at all, and the whole thing survives a server rebuild by copying one directory. Analytics, if you want them, are a privacy-respecting script from the same server, not a game engine concern.

What I'd do

Prototype in melonJS if your game is tile-based and you like Tiled, or in Phaser if you are new and want the larger community; do not agonise, because the hosting side is identical. Build to static files, serve them from the reverse proxy you already run, cache the assets directory aggressively, and keep multiplayer out of scope until the single-player version has players. A browser game on your own domain, with no backend to maintain, is one of the most pleasant things you can self-host.