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 that has the following specs: 4 GB RAM, 2 Cores, 80 GB SSD, priced at $20 per month. Although cheaper instances might be a good idea, we have no issues with more than four users using this instance.



Hosting on a home computer is great and would be less expensive after an entire year. However having a "cloud" instance is much easier to manage and is more convenient to connect with people outside of the home.



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



It also has it's own DNS subdomain, so it's easy to inform your friends how to access it.



Minecraft Server



We've tried mods and created them, so we've also run Spigot servers locally. But on the always-on family server we run the so-called "vanilla" Minecraft server (Java Edition).



Launching the server



The server is an Java executable which needs to be run within the context of a process. I have decided to manage the process by using the GNU terminal multiplexer monitor. The start command would appear like this:



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



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



Server upgrades



Minecraft clients automatically upgrade to the most recent version as soon as it is 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 according to the version number. The old ones are still available. Instead I let the server.jar that I download server.jar replace the older version. This has saved me a step, and I haven't required to downgrade (yet).



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



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



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



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



It's easy enough to be understood when I return to it every couple months



- Automated enough to not be a total pain to use



Backups



The ratcraft script comes with a backup feature. I call it every day via the cron job that is located in Slackware's /etc/cron.daily directory. The script calls:



The backup tells the Minecraft server to stop saving, and creates an .tgz with tar -cpvzf of 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 fill up. Sometimes, we may need to save an important moment in our world, so I just rename one of the backups so it doesn't get removed in the rotation.



How to upgrade or get the JDK



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



The Minecraft server updates seem to require newer and more recent versions of the JVM. While I'm not keeping up with Java world, it seems that the best place to get the JVM right now is:



http://jdk.java.net/



I don't believe you can find the JRE (runtime environment that does not require JVM), which is all you require to run the Minecraft server. It's not that important. The JDK is just a bigger download, since it's a subset of JRE along with compilers and libraries, etc.

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