Notes

How To Host A DIY Minecraft Server At Home With Docker

My oldest child was introduced to Minecraft recently. Minecraft-servers.Biz While a lot of his friends play Bedrock Edition on an iPad or game console, my son is playing the venerable Java Edition on an old computer. (And he can launch it via the terminal! ) To play together I decided to run an Dockerized Minecraft server on my home server, and it was much more straightforward than I anticipated.



Running a dedicated server



The official server distribution comes with one Javajar. It should be simple to use. Before trying it, though, I searched for Docker images, and found a good one: itzg/minecraft-server.



You can either fire up the container by using a docker run command or daemonize it. I prefer to keep it simple and use docker compose in my byobu session.



Here's my current docker-compose.yml file:



There are a variety of configuration options to choose from however I'd like to mention two of them:



The game's persistent data is written to a disk that is mounted to the host, so we can easily access the files. The "WORLD" option is really useful for importing an existing save created on a different computer.



Connecting to the Server



The server will allow connections within a couple of seconds. However my clients aren't in a position to see it. Minecraft will remain on the "Scanning games on your local network" screen for the rest of time. You can still "Add Server" to manually add it, and voila!



Web Map



Most of my Minecraft knowledge is about 10 years old. Third-party tools can create an online view of a Minecraft environment, similar to Google Maps. It seems that Minecraft Overviewer is the most popular tool nowadays.



As I mentioned before, the installation appears fairly straightforward but I discovered a Docker image that's a lot easier. This is a single-shot (not a persistent) process so we'll use docker to run:



Leaflet will create a web map with read-only access to game data from the other container and another volume to write it to. This directory can be symlinked to a web-served directory on the host, such as the directory /var/www/public_html for easy access from any internet browser.



It takes only a few minutes to complete, but the results are quite impressive:



Makefile



Finally, as is my wont I threw in some shortcuts into the Makefile to make them easy to access:



Reasons You Might Want to Build Dockerized Minecraft Server



A DIY dedicated server is probably unnecessary for most people. If you are just wanting to play locally using multiplayer and your computer is sufficiently powerful you can click "Open to LAN" directly from the game. If you're planning to play with a large group of players outside of your household, you're probably better off with a paid-for hosted server. This could be the official "Realms" or one of a variety of third-party options.


Website: https://minecraft-servers.biz/realms/