A turnkey, high-performance Minecraft server inside a Docker container
These instructions will help you get your own Minecraft server up and running in no time.
Your only requirement is a system running Docker with a fair amount of RAM depending on how many instances you want to run. A good rule of thumb is about 4GB of RAM per instance and possibly more if you want to run any heavy plugins.
You can visit the official Docker website here for installation instructions.
Getting an instance of your Spigot-powered Minecraft server up and running is remarkably easy and can be done with a single command:
docker run pragma8123/spigot-in-a-box:latest
This will start a server running on the default port of 25565. However, this is not recommended as your server will not persist across container restarts. For this, we need to mount a volume inside the container at /minecraft.
For example:
docker run -v /my-servers/server-1:/minecraft pragma8123/spigot-in-a-box:latest
This will mount the folder /my-servers/server-1 from host machine inside the container at /minecraft. This will be the main working folder for the server containing our config files, logs, and world data.
From here we can add a few more options to our command and get this:
docker run \
--restart unless-stopped \
--detach \
-e MEM_MIN=1G \
-e MEM_MAX=4G \
-v /my-servers/server-1:/minecraft \
pragma8123/spigot-in-a-box:latest
Explanation:
--restart unless-stopped- tell our container to restart if something crashes or the host system restarts--detach- run in the background-e MEM_MIN=1G- initial JVM heap size of 1GB-e MEM_MAX=4G- maximum JVM heap size of 4GB-v /my-servers/server-1/:/minecraft- mount volume