Notes

Managing A Simple Family Minecraft Server

In summary, I use my ratcraft script to manage a Minecraft server in the "cloud".



Virtual hardware



I have a Linode shared virtual instance with the following specs: 4 GB RAM 2 Cores, 40 GB SSD, priced at $20 per month. Although less expensive instances might be a good idea, we have no problems with more than four people using this particular instance.



Hosting on an in-house computer is great (and is cheaper after an year or so) however having the "cloud" instance is much easier to manage and getting 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, so it's easy to tell friends how to get it.



Minecraft Server



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



The server is launched



The server is a Java executable that must be run in the context of a process. I've decided to manage the process with the GNU terminal multiplexer screen. The start command would look something like this:



I don't believe I can type that many times , so I created a small Bash script to handle it for me.
XSJWM


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



Server upgrades



Minecraft clients automatically upgrade to the latest version as soon as it becomes available.



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 rename the server to the version number, and keep the old ones around. Instead I let the server.jar that I download server.jar replace the older version. Saves a step and I've never had a need to downgrade (yet).



This is the reason I no longer manually edit the script for ratcraft in order to update the server version.



Then I just restart (stop and then start) the server using the following command:



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



It's not a high-end solution, but it's:



- Easy enough to understand for me, when I return to it every couple of months



Simple to use and automated enough to not cause any discomfort



Backups



The ratcraft script includes a backup feature. I call it every day via an cron job within Slackware's /etc/cron.daily directory. The script simply calls:



The backup informs the Minecraft server to stop saving, makes a .tgz using tar -cpvzf from the "world" directory and saves it in the "backups" directory.



The backup command can also perform simple backup rotations to ensure that the server doesn't overflow. Sometimes we might want to keep a crucial moment in our lives. To accomplish this, I simply rename one backup so it doesn’t get removed from the rotation.



Upgrading or Getting the JDK



Maybe you can just use the Java executable that is installed on your system and update with the help of a package manager. But in my universe it's more manual.



The latest and more advanced versions of the JVM are required for Minecraft server updates. I'm not up to speed with the Java world any more, but it looks like the current best location to get the JVM is:



http://jdk.java.net/



I don't think you can locate the JRE (runtime environment that does not require JVM) that's all you need to run the Minecraft server. But not a big deal. The JDK is a larger download as it comes with a superset of JRE plus libraries and compilers.


Read More: https://xsjwm.com/