Notes

How To Host A DIY Minecraft Server At Home With Docker

My oldest child recently delved into Minecraft. My son is the opposite. He, plays Bedrock Edition on an iPad and a game console. He prefers Java Edition on an older computer. (And he launches it from the terminal! ) To play together I decided to run an Dockerized Minecraft server on my home server and it was easier than I expected.



Running a dedicated server



The official server distribution is one Java jar, which means it should be fairly easy to run. Before trying it, though, I searched for Docker images, and found a good one: itzg/minecraft-server.



You can either fire up the container using the docker run command, or daemonize it. But, Minecraft-servers.sbs 've been keeping it simple with docker compose-up in a byobu session.



Here's my current docker.yml file.



There are a ton of available configuration options, but I'd like to emphasize two things above:



The game's data that is persistent is stored on a volume mounted to the host so we can easily access the files. The "WORLD" option allows you to import a save that was made on a different computer.



Connecting to the Server



After a few seconds the server is ready to accept connections, but my clients don't seem to see it for reasons. Minecraft will remain on the "Scanning games on your local network screen" screen for as long as. You can "Add Server" to manually add it, and voila!



Web Map



My Minecraft knowledge is more than a decade old. Third-party tools can provide an online view of a Minecraft environment that is similar to Google Maps. It appears that Minecraft Overviewer is the most well-known tool in the market today.



Like I said, this tool's installation looks pretty straightforward but I discovered an Docker image that's even easier. This is a single-shot (not a persistent) process so we'll use docker ran:



With read-only access to game data produced by the other container and another volume to write to, this will result in a web map with Leaflet. This directory can be symlinked to a web-served directories on the host, such as the /var/www/public_html directory, which allows easy access from any web browser.



It takes only a few minutes to run and the results are quite impressive:



Makefile



Finally, as is my custom I threw in some shortcuts into an Makefile to make it easy to access:



Reasons You Might Want to Build a Dockerized Minecraft Server



Most people don't need an individual server. If you are just looking to play local multiplayer and one of your computers is powerful enough you can click "Open to the LAN" directly from the game. A paid hosted server is best if you want to play with a greater number of people outside your home. This could be the official "Realms", or any of several third-party options.


Read More: https://minecraft-servers.sbs/