What is this?

My final project for CS312 System Administration at Oregon State University was to create a fully automated collection of scripts to provision and configure a Minecraft server on an AWS EC2 instance. This repository is my final submission to that assignment. Despite being for a class these scripts are useful to anyone who wants to setup a Minecraft server on AWS automatically.

What do these scripts do?

provision.sh uses Terraform to spin up a t3.micro EC2 instance, allows Minecraft through the firewall, and assigns a static IP address.
configure.sh uses Ansible to setup a SystemD service to run a Minecraft server as a low-privilege user on start up.

Required dependencies:

provision.sh requires the AWS CLI (aws) and Terraform (terraform).
configure.sh requires only Ansible (ansible-playbook).

Required setup:

You need to place your AWS CLI credentials into ~/.aws/credentials.
Other than that these scripts are fully automated and require no user interaction.

How to use?

First run ./provision.sh to create the EC2 instance.
Then run ./configure.sh to setup the Minecraft server.
NOTE: You need to log in to the aws cli before running ./provision.sh.

How to connect?

./provision.sh will print the Minecraft server IP address after running. Copy this IP address into Minecraft to connect (NOTE: The server IP address can also be found in the ansible_host field in ./minecraft_hosts.ini).

What happens under the hood?

Under the hood ./provision.sh uses Terraform and the AWS CLI to do the following:

• Create a new security group allowing all outbound traffic and inbound traffic for Minecraft or SSH.
• Create a new RSA 4096 keypair and saves the private key to ./minecraft_key.pem.
• Allocate a new static IP using AWS elastic IPs.
• Create a new t3.micro EC2 instance with the created security group, keypair, and elastic IP.

Under the hood ./configure.sh uses Ansible to do the following:

• Update all system packages.
• Install java 26.
• Create a low privilege user called Minecraft.
• Use ./get_latest_jar_url.py to locate the download url for the latest Minecraft server jar.
• Download the Minecraft server jar file.
• Accept the Minecraft EULA.
• Create a SystemD service called minecraft.service.
• Start this service and enable it to run on boot.