Running a cost-efficient on-demand Minecraft Server on AWS

A step by step guide to set up your own Minecraft server on AWS can be found at franok.de/techblog

For setup instructions using Ansible, refer to the blog post Deploying a Minecraft Server on AWS with Ansible and the respective ansible branch of this repository.

PaperMC

A spigot-based mc-server wrapped in paper.

https://papermc.io/

When updating paper, also plugins need to be updated (search on the internet which plugin version is compatible with with server version!)

some useful plugins that won't ruin survival gaming:

• https://dev.bukkit.org/projects/multiverse-portals
• https://dev.bukkit.org/projects/multiverse-core
• https://luckperms.net/download
• https://dev.bukkit.org/projects/worldedit
• https://dev.bukkit.org/projects/worldguard

Download via wget/curl not possible due to redirects, so download via browser and copy the jar files into the s3 bucket web interface, into the server's plugins/ folder (e.g. use scp command)

Operations

managing the ec2 instance

aws ec2 start-instances --instance-ids i-0123456789454ab3c
aws ec2 describe-instance-status --instance-id i-0123456789454ab3c
aws ec2 stop-instances --instance-ids i-0123456789454ab3c

get public ipv4 for ec2 instance:

aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-id i-0123456789454ab3c | grep -i publicip
aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-id i-0123456789454ab3c | jq '.Reservations[0].Instances[0].PublicIpAddress'

Accessing the Instance (SSH)

ssh -i <path/to/keypair.pem> ec2-user@<public-ipv4>

backing up the server files to s3

# remove existing backup tar file, if exists:
rm -v /minecraft/mc-server.tar
# zip latest server data into tar file:
tar cf /minecraft/mc-server.tar /minecraft/mc-server
# copy to s3:
aws s3 cp /minecraft/mc-server.tar s3://<s3-bucket-name>/backup/$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')/

Trouble shooting

Check if minecraft.service is running

systemctl status minecraft

Check mc-server log output

tail -f /minecraft/mc-server/logs/latest.log