Notes

Managing A Simple Family Minecraft Server

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



Virtual hardware



I have a Linode shared virtual instance with the following specs: 4GB RAM, 2 Cores and 80GB SSD at $20 per month. Although less expensive instances might work, we have no issues with more than four users using this instance.



Hosting on an in-house computer works fantastic (and would be cheaper after one year or so), but having the "cloud" instance is much simpler to manage and getting friends outside of the house connected is 100% easier.



The instance runs Slackware Linux and I do all management of the server from the command line via SSH.



I also gave it the DNS subdomain so it's real easy to let friends know how to get it.



Minecraft Server



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



Launching the server



The server is an Java executable that needs to be maintained in an ongoing process. I have chosen to manage the process using the GNU terminal multiplexer monitor. The start command would be something like this:



Obviously I'm not going to write that more than once I've written an application (a wee Bash script) to handle this for me. It's called Ratcraft.



It's approximately 130 lines of Bash and includes a handful of commands:



Server upgrades



Minecraft clients automatically upgrade to the most recent version when 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 more manually rename the server 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 old. This has saved me a step, and I haven't needed 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 simply restart (stop and start) the server with the ratcraft command:



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



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



It's easy enough for me to understand when I revisit it each couple of months



- Easy to use and automated enough to not cause any pain



Backups



The backup function in the ratcraft script is accessible. It is called every day by a cron job in Slackware's /etc/cron.daily directory. The script just calls:



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



The backup command is also able to perform simple backup rotations in order to ensure that the server does not overflow. Occasionally we might wish to preserve an important epoch in our history So I simply rename one of the backups to ensure it doesn't disappear in the rotation.



How to upgrade or get the JDK



You could just run the java executable from your system and then update it using a package manger. MINECRAFT SERVERS In my experience it's a little more manual.



More advanced and modern versions of the JVM are required to support Minecraft server updates. I don't keep up with the Java world at all now however, it appears that the current best location to get the JVM is:



http://jdk.java.net/



I'm not sure any way to get the JRE (runtime environment with JVM that is all that is required to run the Minecraft server). It's not an issue. The JDK is just a bigger download since it's a superset of JRE plus compiler and libraries, etc.


Here's my website: https://thinkofdeath.co.uk/