PaperMC auto-shutdown script

This is a small Python script I've written to be able to automate deallocating my PaperMC virtual machine if there was no one playing at the moment. Along with it there is a startup shellscript (startup.sh) meant to be executed as a cronjob and an Ansible playbook (mc_playbook.yaml) to set it all up.

How it works

• startup.sh spawns a new tmux session with PaperMC on the left side, and stopper.py on the right side. It redirects the output of PaperMC to stopper.py via tmux pipe-pane command piping to a named pipe, which in turn gets redirected to stopper.py. It also redirects the stdout and stderr of stopper.py to a logfile (whose location is defined in vars.yaml).
• stopper.py reads from standard input and counts the number of active players. If that number drops to 0, it starts a timer. If the timer is not cancelled by a player join and it finishes, it starts a deallocation procedure (dealloc_vm). Since I've hosted my virtual machine on Azure, I've set up a small Azure Logic App that deallocates the virtual machine on a HTTP GET request (hence dealloc_url in vars.yaml).

How to use it (if you want to)

I will assume you know how to use Ansible. If you don't, Ansible docs are one of the best I've come across: https://docs.ansible.com/

Just change the necessary variables in vars.yaml and mc_playbook.yaml. All of them start with your_. I would also advise to skim through the rest of the variables, not all of the default values are guaranteed to be fitting for your usecase.

Known issues

• PaperMC's console log timestamp doesn't match system time (and therefore scripts' logfiles timestamps, which can lead to confusion reviewing those)