Notes

Managing A Simple Family Minecraft Server

In short I employ my ratcraft script in order to manage a Minecraft server in the "cloud".



Virtual hardware



I have an Linode shared virtual instance with the following specs: 4 GB RAM 2 Cores, 80 GB SSD, and a price of $20 per month. Less expensive instances could work, but we've had no issue with four or more users playing on this instance.



Hosting on an in-house computer is great (and will be less expensive after about an year or so) however having the "cloud" instance is much easier to manage and keeping friends outside the house is completely easier.



The instance runs Slackware Linux, and I manage the server via SSH.



I also gave it a DNS subdomain, making it easy to tell friends how to access it.



Minecraft Server



We've played around with mods (and creating them) We've also run Spigot servers locally. On the server that is family-owned we have the "vanilla" Minecraft server (Java Edition).



The server is launched



The server is a Java executable and needs to be run as an ongoing process. I've decided to manage the process with the GNU terminal multiplexer screen. This is the start command.



I don't think I could type that many times so I created a small Bash script to handle it for me.



It contains about 130 lines of Bash and a few 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 name of the server according to the version number. The older versions are still available. Instead I let the server.jar downloaded server.jar overwrite the previous one. This saves me a step, and I haven’t required 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 restart the server (stop and start) using the program ratcraft.



The server will be ready in a matter of minutes for the new clients.



It's not a solution for commercial use, but it's:



It's easy enough for me to understand when I come back to it every couple of months



- Easy to use and sufficiently automated to not cause any discomfort



Backups



The backup feature in the ratcraft script is in place. I use it daily by calling a cron job in Slackware's /etc/cron.daily directory. minecraft servers The script simply calls:



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



The backup command also runs a simple backup rotations so that the server doesn't fill up. Sometimes we might want to keep a crucial moment in our lives. To do this, I simply change the name of one backup to ensure it doesn't disappear from the rotation.



How do I upgrade the JDK



You could just run the java executable from your system and then update it using the package manager. In my experience, it's a bit more manual.



More advanced and modern versions of the JVM are required to support Minecraft server updates. Although I am not keeping up with Java world, it appears that the best way to get the JVM right now is:



http://jdk.java.net/



I don't think you'll be able to find the JRE (runtime environment ) without JVM) which is all you require to run the Minecraft server. It's not a huge deal. The JDK is simply a bigger download, since it's a subset of JRE plus compiler and libraries, etc.


My Website: https://minecraft-server.co/