On this Minecraft Admin page, I intend to journal some of the tools and utilities I use or develop to manage a Minecraft server. Currently we are running Minecraft Java Edition 1.16.3.
The server is running on Google Cloud Platform, and was mainly implemented using this guide. I can also recommend the series on A Cloud Guru on Creating your own Minecraft Server. This was very helpful in understanding how to “daemon-ize” the Minecraft Java commands.
I have made quite a few changes. For example:
- Minecraft is running as systemd daemon under the minecraft user, however it still launches inside of screen to be able to attach and send commands to the console. This is useful when telling the server to suspend saving to disk, in order to write a backup.
- I’ve modified the backup script so that it compresses the world directory into a tar.gz file before uploading to Google Cloud storage. This ensures a faster transfer into Google Cloud storage, at about half the size.
- I have the Minecraft disk set to mount in the /etc/fstab file, rather than being run as a startup script in Google Cloud.
The admin server (this website) is running on a Google Cloud free f1-micro instance. This allows some monitoring and control scripts to be run on the Minecraft server remotely.
