Minecraft Ansible

Simplify managing Minecraft on your Ubuntu server using Ansible.

The following instructions are for setting up a Minecraft server from scratch using Ubuntu as the operating system. This can be done on a physical machine or a virtual machine. However, the basics in this project could easily be reused for managing an existing server or even multiple servers.

Pre-setup

1. Install Ubuntu server edition, selecting the SSH Server option when prompted for addition software to install.
2. Copy your SSH key to the new server using ssh-copy-id.

Setup

1. Install Ansible

2. Add your Minecraft server to /etc/ansible/hosts:

    [minecraft]
    your.hostname.or.ip.address
   

4. Install the packages required for Ansible to work by running:

    ansible-playbook -K -l minecraft bootstrap.yml
   

Installation

Spigot

1. Add a variable defining where to find your copy of version 1649 of the Spigot jar to /etc/ansible/hosts:

       [minecraft:vars]
       spigot1649_path=/path/to/spigot1649.jar
   

2. Run the following to configure the server to run Spigot:

    ansible-playbook -K-l minecraft spigot-server.yml
   

Updating Spigot

To update the patch applied to Spigot, either update the values in roles/spigot-server/defaults/main..yml or add updated versions of the following variables to the [minecraft:vars] section of your /etc/ansible/hosts:

    # What version Spigot patch to apply
    spigot_patch_version: '20141113a'
    # MD5 checksum of the patch being applied
    spigot_patch_md5: '12ace759005798adf91d9fe4675fff48'
    # MD5 checksum of the finished, patched jar file
    spigot_patched_jar_md5: '870c9021be261bd285c966c642b23c32'

Then rerun:

    ansible-playbook -K -l minecraft spigot-server.yml

Minecraft server console

To connect to the Minecraft server console:

1. SSH to your server.

2. Run:

    sudo -u minecraft tmux attach-session -t minecraft