IaC Minecraft Server on Digital Ocean

Based of https://medium.com/@vyrtualsynthese/on-demand-minecraft-server-with-terraform-and-digital-ocean-3afcc8a5fe90

Prerequisite

• A Digital Ocean account with few credits to rent your droplet.
• Digital Ocean CLI to get some informations from DO API.
• OpenSSH client to generate your SSH key to be used to identify to your Droplets. I think it is available out of the box for all windows and mac. For linux refere o your favorit package manager.
• A tool to tar gz. Native on almost all linux distro and mac. For windows I prefer 7zip.
• Java 8.
• MCrcon to inject commands on your running Minecraft Server.
• Terraform.
• Python3 and pip3
  • Install the requirements.txt in the discordbot folder (pip3 install -r requirements.txt)

Prepare the project for production

1. Download your Minecraft Server from minecraft official website https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server/

cd Digital-Ocean-OnDemand-Minecraft-Server
wget [the server link taken from minecraft website]

2. Create an ‘minecraft-server’ folder and move your server files into the uploadFolder

mkdir uploadFolder/minecraft-server
mv server.jar uploadFolder/minecraft-server

3. If it is a new server run it one time to generate server configuration files

java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar uploadFolder/minecraft-server/server.jar nogui

4. The server should start and stop by himself then you could edit eula.txt. Set eula to true. It should be like this.

eula=true

5. Next step is to setup your server.properties file. Feel free to configure your server as you want but you need to make sure enable-rcon is set to true and you have an rcon.password set up.

rcon.password=foo
enable-rcon=true

6. Make sure your configuration is ok by running the server on last time and connecting to it. Then shut it down and you are all set. Last Step is to compress the server file in tar.gz format.

cd uploadFolder
tar czvf minecraft-server.tar.gz minecraft-server

SSH Keys

You need an ssh key to help terraform inject commands over SSH into your droplet instance after it is activated. First it is better to generate a dedicated SSH key for your Terraform scripts.

ssh-keygen

We will name that new key mc_rsa

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/justin-p/.ssh//id_rsa): /home/justin-p/.ssh/mc_rsa

Connect doctl with your Digital Ocean account

Run doctl auth init command. Go to your Digital Ocean accout under API and click Generate New Token. Then copy your token into the terminal. Now your doctl have access to your account information.

Configure your terraform variables

Inside the project copy the example environment variable

cp terraform.tfvars.example terraform.tfvars

Make sure you set the Required variables. You can set the Optional variables if you don't like the defaults.
For information about Droplet sizes run the following command: doctl compute size list --output json | less. This will give your information about available droplets. When you have chose your droplet size take note of your droplet slug and region and input it in your terraform.tfvars file. My go to droplets are s-1vcpu-1gb and s-2vcpu-4gb.

Docker-Compose

If you change the default droplet size don't forget to update the docker-compose.yml file in the upload folder to reflect your chose of droplet.

Examples

s-1vcpu-1gb

command: "java -Xms512M -Xmx512M -jar server.jar"

s-2vcpu-4gb

command: "java -Xms3072M -Xmx3584M -jar server.jar"

Discord Intergration

You can enable Discord webhook intergration. To do so create a webhook and set the webhook variable in terraform.tfvars.

Examples

On server creation

CoronerBot BOT Today at 10:04 PM
Minecraft server mc-server has just been created, may take up to 2 minutes for everything to load. IP: 64.227.67.164

On server deletion

CoronerBot BOT Today at 10:04 PM
The Minecraft server mc-server at IP 64.227.67.164 is shutting down.

Run your Minecraft Server

Now the hard part is done time to run your Minecraft Server with some simple commands. Make sure you are in the terraform folder and then run the following commands

terraform init

terraform plan

terraform apply

Then after reviewing your configuration write yes

Once terraform finishes deploying the Droplet it will print your External IP in your terminal. You may have to wait few more minutes until the Minecraft Server finished loading. To connect to the console of your server your can use mcrcon as following

mcrcon -H <Your-Server-ip> -p <your-rcon-password>

Destroy your Minecraft Server

From inside the terraform folder type the following command

terraform destroy

Then after reviewing your configuration type yes

Your minecraft server will be gracefully shut down. The world and server configuration will then compressed and downloaded in to your local Minecraft Server folder. Then it will continue to destory the Droplet.