CLI tool for hosting and managing a Minecraft server

⚠️ Alpha software under development ⚠️

Features

• Agnostic to the Minecraft version: Run any Minecraft version or any variant of the server. Bukkit, Spigot, Paper, Forge... you name it.
• Built-in Java version management: Use the Java version that better works with your setup.
• Backups: Provided by the fantastic Restic.
• Run as a service: Ourcraft can configure the required Systemd service definition for you.
• Easy: Just give it a try!

Installation

Read the script before using it. You should always look at what you're piping to sudo bash.

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sirikon/ourcraft-installer/master/install.sh | sudo bash

Alternatively, you can do the same process manually, downloading a pre-compiled binary from releases section and installing it. Make sure that the ourcraft binary is present in your PATH.

If you prefer installation from source, clone the repository and run the following:

make
sudo make install

Usage

Create a new folder to host your server and cd into it. Then run the configure subcommand to launch an interactive configuration wizard.

mkdir coolserver
cd coolserver
ourcraft configure

The wizard will ask you for each possible setting, showing between parentheses the default value.

Once the wizard finishes, there's a new file inside coolserver called config.json that stores the configuration, and a folder called server that contains your actual Minecraft server, but it's empty for now.

Download inside the server folder a Minecraft server .jar file. You can use any official or custom server. If you're not sure, let's use the official one.

Make sure that the downloaded .jar file name matches the "Server JAR" configuration introduced previously. Remember that you can run ourcraft configure whenever you want to change the configuration if needed.

Now we need a java installation, which is really easy:

ourcraft java-list
# Choose a version from the list, and then run:
ourcraft java-use <version> # For example: openjdk-8u252-hs

That will download and install the specified Java version locally. It will not affect your global java installation, it will just work for the minecraft server. You can see it's installed in a new folder called java inside coolserver.

Once that's done, run the server with:

ourcraft start

You'll probably need to accept some EULA or something like that, but once that's done, you'll have a Minecraft server running!

That will just work as long as your terminal emulator is open, but we can install it as a service.

Install as a service

This requires systemd and systemd/user configured in your current user. If you're using Ubuntu 20.04 (desktop or server) you have everything set up already.

To install our Minecraft server as a service that runs in background, just run:

ourcraft service-install

And then, to start it:

ourcraft service-start

That's it! You're running Minecraft in the background. To get access to the console, run this:

ourcraft service-attach

But be careful, this attaches to a GNU Screen session. If you hit Ctrl+c in your terminal emulator, the server will stop. To detach from the server console without stopping the server, you need to hit Ctrl+a and then just d. That, for Screen, means "Action -> Detach".