k8craft - Minecraft Server on the Google Cloud Platform

Fast and simple setup of Minecraft/Spigot server on Google's infrastructure.

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Overview

This collection of scripts and instructions allows anyone with a Google Cloud Platform account to:

• Spin up a low-cost, highly performant Minecraft or Spigot server in under 10 minutes, using only a web browser;
• Perform restart and other server console commands using the browser; and
• Manage the server's data directory over the SSH/SFTP protocol, with graphical tools like Cyberduck, or command-line tools like scp and rsync.

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Features

• Runs Spigot or vanilla Minecraft server.

• Built on Google Container Engine, which uses best-of-breed infrastructure and software (Kubernetes/Docker/Linux4.x) to outperform other cloud providers on reliability, latency and throughput. For Minecraft, this means more uptime, less server lag and faster chunk loading for users!

• Free for 2 months. GCP is currently offering a 2-month/US$300 free trial, which is enough to run quite a powerful server for those 2 months. The default configuration costs about US$25 per month and allocates 2.5GB of RAM to Minecraft. It can comfortably serve 20 or more players, and is easy to temporarily shut down between sessions to save money.

• Lightweight, efficient and secure - runs as a pair of Docker containers that share the server's Minecraft data volume, but are otherwise isolated: one container for the Java process and one container for the SSH daemon. To maximize available RAM and CPU for the Java process, no web server front-end or extraneous processes are run.

• Fast and easy setup and teardown.

• 100% Open-source.

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Installation

Create a working server using the Google Cloud Console. See the setup document for detailed instructions.

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Server Management

Simple management tasks like checking the log and issuing server commands can be done with a web browser. However, adjusting server settings or installing plugins must be performed by managing the server's data directory and config files. See the server maintenance instructions for details.

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Contribution / Development

After installing Docker and git, you can adjust / rebuild the 2 Docker images like this:

git clone https://github.com/benton/k8craft.git
cd k8craft
docker-compose run spigot-build
docker-compose build spigot
docker-compose build ssh

Run the server locally, with k8craft/data as the data directory:

docker-compose up spigot

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This software was created by Benton Roberts (benton@bentonroberts.com)