Notes

Managing A Simple Family Minecraft Server

In the end I utilize my ratcraft script to manage the Minecraft server in the "cloud".



Virtual hardware



I have an Linode shared virtual instance with the following specs: 4GB RAM, 2 Cores and an 80GB SSD for $20 a month. Cheaper instances may work, but we've experienced no issue with four or more people playing on this particular instance.



Hosting on a personal computer works great (and will be less expensive after about an year or so), but having the "cloud" instance is much simpler to manage and getting your friends outside of the home is 100% easier.



The server runs Slackware Linux and I do all server management at the command line using SSH.



It also comes with a DNS subdomain, making it easy to inform your acquaintances how to access it.



Minecraft Server



We've tried mods (and creating them) and have run Spigot servers locally. However, on our family server, we run the so-called "vanilla" Minecraft server (Java Edition).



Launching the server



The server is a Java executable that needs to be kept running within a process. I have decided to manage the process with the GNU terminal multiplexer monitor. The start command would look something like this:



Obviously I'm not going to type that more than once so I created a little application (a tiny Bash script) to handle this for me called ratcraft.



It has around 130 lines of Bash and a handful of commands.



Server upgrades



The Minecraft clients automatically update to the most recent version when it's released.



Getting the latest server to match is as simple as grabbing the tarball link from minecraft.net/download/server and downloading it on the host:



UPDATE: I no longer manually change the server's name in accordance with the version number. The older versions are still available. Instead, I let the server.jar that I downloaded server.jar overwrite the previous version. This has saved me a step, and I've not needed to downgrade (yet).



So I no longer have to do this step manually editing the script in ratcraft to update the server version:



Then, I simply restart the server (stop and then start) using the program ratcraft.



In a few moments, the server is in good shape for the new clients.



Although it is not a solution that can be used commercially, it is:



Easy enough for me to understand when I revisit it every couple months



- Automated enough not to be a hassle to use



Backups



The ratcraft script comes with a backup feature. It is called every day by a cron job in Slackware’s /etc/cron.daily directory. The script simply calls:



The backup tells Minecraft server to stop saving, then creates a.tgz by using tar –cpvzf from the "world" directory and saves it to the directory "backups".



The backup command also runs a simple backup rotations to ensure that the server doesn't fill up. Sometimes, we may need to save an important moment in our history So I simply rename one of the backups to ensure it won't be removed during the rotation.



Upgrading or Getting the JDK



You could just run the java executable on your system and update using a package manager. In my world it's more manual.



The Minecraft server upgrades seem to require newer and newer versions of the JVM. I'm not up to speed with the Java world now however, it appears that the current best location to get the JVM is:



http://jdk.java.net/



I don't see how you can obtain just the JRE (runtime environment with JVM that is all that is needed to run the Minecraft server). It's not that important. The JDK is a more substantial download as it comes with an enhanced version of the JRE plus libraries and compilers.

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