mcserver

An interactive Bash script to simplify the management of multiple Minecraft servers from a single unified location, including launching, backing up, and changing the message of the day (MotD; requires Python)

Current features:

• All servers (logs, world, and associated configuration files) are stored in separate directories, by default located in ~/.minecraft-server
• All backups are stored in separate dated directories, by default located in ~/.minecraft-server/backups
  • "backups" are just full copies of an entire server. The dated directory may contain backups of multiple servers for that day
• Interactive servers list is sorted by date modified, so default is most recently used
• The server MotD may be viewed and changed prior to launch (requires Python)
• Prompts for backing up the server are presented when the server is stopped. Backups can also be run at will from the main menu
• A new server can be created based on the template of an existing server, with level data imported from a custom location (optionally excluding player data)

Planned features:

• Implementation of noninteractive flags and arguments
• Extend mcserver-motd to handle all server.properties edits, especially to permit easy toggling of options such as command block validity

Screenshots

Figure 1: Example of recommended main servers directory structure

Requirements

The script requires the following packages and libraries:

• python
  • sys
  • getopt
  • pyjavaproperties

You may need to install pyjavaproperties:

# pip install pyjavaproperties

Installation

Clone the repository with

$ git clone https://github.com/Phidica/mcserver.git

Copy the mcserver and mcserver-motd files to your directory of choice. ~/.local/bin/ is a good one, if that's on your $PATH. Make the primary script executable with

$ chmod +x mcserver

Edit the mcserver file, if necessary, to ensure it points to an existing main servers directory containing more directories where each consists of the components for one server

Server directory names cannot contain whitespace or particularly fancy characters

Each server directory must contain a run.sh script that will cause that server to start. An example of a valid run.sh script is the following:

java -Xms2G -Xmx4G -jar ../minecraft_server.1.8.8.jar nogui

Note that the implication here is that the main servers directory contains server JAR files, as seen in Figure 1, which is recommended to keep them out of the backups. If you wish to keep the server JAR in the server directory, do so and remove the ../ from the example above

Execution

The primary program accepts no flags or arguments, just run:

$ mcserver