This is my setup for running some various minecraft servers on my home network so that I can play with friends.
It uses the itzg/minecraft-server Docker image to run. This is just a normal survival server and doesn't run with any mods. Check out the official docker image docs to see how to run this with mods on the server if desired (I personally have not done this, good luck!).
Run the server with the following command from the docker directory:
docker-compose up -d
This will start the container detached. When it is started for the first time it will create a data folder
in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file that contains all the normal Minecraft data like the
saved world and ops.json file. The data folder is ignored by Git, as is any ops.json file that may be outside of
it.
The server will be running on post 42071 by default, with a set seed of 387579004540251912. You can change these in the
docker-compose.yml file to be whatever you want. If you want a random seed, then just delete the SEED enviornment variable
from the compose file.
This is set up to restart the container unless it is stopped with docker-compose down, so it will be automatically restarted
when the server is booted.
We can use the rcon-cli interface to send commands to the Minecraft server through Docker.
For example, we can tell the server to save the world data with the following:
docker-compose -f PATH/TO/docker-compose.yml exec mc rcon-cli save-all
Obviously you need to replace the PATH/TO/docker-compose.yml with the actual path to the minecraft docker-compose.yml file.
When playing with friends I like to be extra safe and back up the minecraft world save data to some other drive. We can do
this with the run-backup.sh script. This script will compress the docker folder in this repo to a tar.gz file and then
move that tar file to the given destination path.
I would recommend adding this as a cron job to make it easier.
crontab -e
Add the following line somewhere in there:
# Run the backup script at 4 AM and 4 PM (4, 16), putting the tar file in the given folder
0 4,16 * * * /path/to/base/minecraft/run-backup.sh -o /path/to/archive/minecraft/base-mc
To play on LAN you need to allow 42071 through the ubuntu firewall. One example using ufw is:
sudo ufw allow 42071 comment "For minecraft server"
sudo ufw reload
If you want to play with friends then you will need to port forward the 42071 port (or whatever you changed it to in the docker-compose.yml file) on your router.
Additionally, you will need some kind of dynamic DNS solution so that other people can get to your public facing IP address with ease. Personally I use No-Ip to do this because it is free, easy, and simple to use.
Once you pick out a url from noip, then just have people join foobar.hopto.org:42071 in Minecraft to play.