minecraft-addon-toolchain

Helps with some common tasks when building a minecraft mod for Bedrock edition:

• builds .mcpack and .mcaddon packages
• installs the mod into Minecraft for Windows 10's development folders
• watches for file changes and reinstalls as necessary
• has extension points to do transpilation

Prerequisites

Software	Minimum	Recommended
Minecraft	Minecraft Bedrock Edition Beta	Minecraft Bedrock Edition Beta on your Windows 10 device
Storage	1.0 GB of free space for text editor, game, and scripts	3.0 GB of free space for Visual Studio, game, and scripts
Node.js	8.x	10.x

Scripting in Minecraft is currently only officially supported on Windows 10 Bedrock Edition Beta, however there have been reports that users have been able to use alternative launchers to get scripting working on other platforms, and although the toolchain attempts to support Linux, Mac OS and Android, they are currently untested and support for these platforms is limited. (I am happy to take PRs to improve the experience)

Getting the Bedrock Edition Beta

Mojang provides instructions on how to get into the Beta program here: How to get into Minecraft betas

Getting Started

Ensure you have a package.json file present in your development directory, if you do not, you can create a minimal valid package with the following contents:

{
	"private": true
}

install the package (It's not currently available on NPM, you'll have to use the Github repository)

npm install --save-dev minecraft-addon-toolchain

This will automatically install gulp vNext (4.0.0)

Create a gulpfile.js gulp configuration

use the following as a template for your gulpfile.js, replacing <youraddonname> with the name of your mod, which will be used on the filesystem to identify your mod

const MinecraftAddonBuilder = require("minecraft-addon-toolchain/v1");

const builder = new MinecraftAddonBuilder(<youraddonname>);
module.exports = modBuilder.configureEverythingForMe();

The MinecraftAddonBuilder object can be used to create your own tasks, but the default tasks configured by configureEverythingForMe() should be sufficient for simple addons.

Next, update your package.json with appropriate scripts, here are some useful scripts

  "scripts": {
    "build": "gulp build",
    "installaddon": "gulp install",
    "rebuild": "gulp rebuild",
    "watch": "gulp watch"
  },

• use npm run build to create the directory structure for a .mcaddon
• use npm run installaddon to install the addon into Minecraft for Windows 10
• use npm run rebuild to clean the build directory and rebuild it
• use npm run watch to:
  • build the project
  • deploy it to to Minecraft for Windows 10
  • monitor for changes on the filesystem
    • automatically rebuilds and deploys the project.

Conventions

These scripts will assume a certain directory structure by default. These can be overridden by altering properties on the MinecraftModBuilder object in your gulpfile.js.

directory	purpose	config property
.\packs	place a directory in here for each pack you have. The type of the pack will be determined by it's manifest.json file	sourceDir
.\out\bundled	the constructed pack directories will be assembled here, ready for deployment into Minecraft	bundleDir
.\out\packaged	constructed .mcpack and .mcaddon files will be placed here	packageDir

an example of changing the build directory would look something like this:

const MinecraftAddonBuilder = require("minecraft-addon-toolchain/v1");

const builder = new MinecraftAddonBuilder(<youraddonname>);
builder.bundleDir = "./bundle";
builder.packageDir = "./package";

Using plugins

We provide the following plugins.

Because plugins insert themselves into the toolchain, their order is dependent. Refer to their individual read me files for installation and usage.

NPM package	Purpose	Readme
minecraft-addon-toolchain-typescript	Adds support for TypeScript	TypeScript Plugin read me
minecraft-addon-toolchain-browserify	Adds support for modern JavaScript features, especially module loading and multi-file projects	Browserify Plugin read me
minecraft-addon-toolchain-terser	Adds support for minifying and obfuscating JavaScript when building .mcpack and .mcaddon files	Terser Plugin read me