Alright, recently my friends and I wanted to start up a new Minecraft world, and I got challened to host my own server. It wound up being super easy and I’m just going to go over how I configured the server and any other notes here.

About the Setup

To allow all of my friends to access the local server, I gave them access to my tailnet. It works super slick for now, but I had to upgrade to the personal plus plan and fork over the extra $6 for this first month. Long-term, I’m going to setup an OpenVPN on my network so that I can get around this and surpass my 6 user limit.

It will be pretty hard to ditch the tailnet, however, because it was stupid simple to setup and it’s way less demanding as opposed to a VPN by only routing the necessary traffic over the tailnet. Getting my non-techy friends and technically-saavy friends to onboard to the tailnet was nice and easy by either emailing them a link or sending them an onboarding link. Then after adding my account, they were a part of my network!

After they successfully joined the tailnet, they just had to server name using my custom DNS domain and they were in.

Setting up the Minecraft Server

Luckily, there was a great doc in the Arch Wiki on Minecraft that I could follow to configure the server. It was a pretty easy setup of configuring the minecraft user and group and then starting the service with systemd.

Permissions

Creating the minecraft user and group

Pretty simple to create the user and group, and just called them both minecraft. Here are the steps:

# Create minecraft group
sudo groupadd minecraft

# Create minecraft user, assign it to the minecraft group, and create a home directory
sudo useradd -m -g minecraft minecraft

Since I am running the Minecraft server with systemd, I just validated that the Minecraft service was running with the correct user and group(located at /lib/systemd/system/minecraftd.service):

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/minecraftd start
ExecStop=/usr/bin/minecraftd stop
User=minecraft
Group=minecraft

Set permissions for the Minecraft directory

In order to ensure that the minecraft user has the appropriate permissions to access and modify files in the /srv/minecraft directory, I made sure to provided the user and group ownership:

# Change ownership of the /srv/minecraft directory to the minecraft user and group
sudo chown -R minecraft:minecraft /srv/minecraft

# Set the appropriate permissions
sudo chmod -R 755 /srv/minecraft

Add my user to the minecraft group

Finally, to make sure I had all the necessary permissions to the directory, I made sure to add myself to the group as well:

# Add an existing user to the minecraft group
sudo usermod -aG minecraft louis

Running the Server

First, needed to accept the EULA by modifying /srv/minecraft/eula.txt. We also wanted a solid spawn point, so I configured level-seed of the server.properties file to have the cherry blossom value(-5584399987456711267). Then, just a super simple systemctl start minecraftd was needed. I also made sure to enable the service so that is runs on reboot.

Monitoring

Since there are people that rely on this server now and I want to make sure they know when the server is healthy and when it isn’t, I was thinking I could monitor the server with Prometheus from my RaspberryPi. It would be a pretty simple setup of running a node-exporter for general server information, the JVM and more system-specific minecraft-prometheus-exporter and maybe even the more gameplay-specific minecraft-prometheus-exporter.

I’ll have to make a post about that later, I haven’t had time to finish configuring that monitoring, but would be simple to first get it monitoring and then later to get alerting setup to the minecraft slack channel.