Notes

Managing A Simple Family Minecraft Server

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



Virtual hardware



I have a Linode shared virtual instance with the following specifications: 4GB RAM 2 Cores and an 80GB SSD for $20 a month. While cheaper instances may work, we have no issues with more than four users using this virtual instance.



Hosting on your own computer is great and would be less expensive after one year. However having a "cloud" instance is much easier to manage and it is easier to connect with people outside of the home.



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



I also gave it an DNS subdomain, so it's easy to tell friends how to access it.



Minecraft Server



We've tested mods and made them, so we've run Spigot servers locally. Minecraft Games On the server for our family we run the "vanilla" Minecraft server (Java Edition).



Launching the server



The server is a Java executable and needs to be kept running in a process. I have chosen to manage the process using the GNU terminal multiplexer monitor. This is the start command.



I don't think I can type that many times so I wrote a small Bash script to manage it for me.



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



Server upgrades



The Minecraft clients automatically update to the latest version the moment 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 old ones are still available. Instead, I let the server.jar that I download server.jar replace the previous version. Saves a step and I've not had any need to downgrade (yet).



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



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



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



While it's not a commercial-grade solution this is:



- Simple enough for me to comprehend when I revisit it each couple of months



- Automated enough not to be a hassle to use



Backups



The backup function in the ratcraft script is available. It is called each day by a cron job in Slackware’s /etc/cron.daily directory. The script simply calls:



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



The backup command can also perform simple backup rotation so the server doesn't fill up. Sometimes we'd like to preserve a significant moment in our lives. To accomplish this, I just rename one backup to ensure that it doesn't be removed from the rotation.



How do I upgrade the JDK



You can run the java executable from your system and then update with the help of a package manager. But in my universe, it's a little more manual.



The latest and more advanced versions of the JVM are required for Minecraft server upgrades. Although I'm not keeping up with Java world, it seems that the best way to get the JVM currently is:



http://jdk.java.net/



I don't believe you can locate 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 merely a larger download because it's a superset of JRE as well as compilers and libraries, etc.


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