Minecraft Hibernate

Automatically start your Minecraft server when someone tries to join and shut it down when no one is online anymore.

This script needs to run on the same host as the Minecraft server. When the Minecraft server is offline, it spawns a service on the same port to listen for incoming connections. When a player tries to connect (read: loads Minecraft's multiplayer screen, containing this server), the script automatically starts the Minecraft server, which allows the player to connect after some seconds.

1. Edit start.sh.example and rename it to start.sh
2. Edit start.sh.example and rename it to stop.sh
3. Make the .sh files executable: chmod +x start.sh stop.sh
4. python3 run.py

start.sh

This script should contain the command to start your server. For example docker start minecraft or systemctl start minecraft.service. You can also add a notification service command here, for example using https://ntfy.sh.

stop.sh

This script should contain the command to stop your server.

config.py

You can edit some settings here, such as the server address and the time-out before the server is shutdown.

whitelist.txt & blacklist.txt

Here you control which IP addresses are allowed to start the Minecraft server. Make sure to enter 1 address per line in the file.
Adding addresses to the whitelist, disables the blacklist.

Systemd

In order to run Minecraft Hibernate at boot on Linux, create a file /etc/systemd/system/mc-hibernate.service containing:

[Unit]
Description=Minecraft Hibernate
After=network.target

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/minecraft-hibernate
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 run.py
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then run:

$ systemctl daemon-reload
$ systemctl enable mc-hibernate
$ systemctl start mc-hibernate