XCCTW minecraft server Configuration

Introduction

This is the configuration for XCCTW minecraft server, which has hosted on minecraft://mc.xcc.tw now.

If you want to play, please open your minecraft client and connect to mc.xcc.tw.

In this configuration, we use docker-compose to manage the server, and use docker-compose-volume-check.yml to check the volume.

How to use

Basically, all server setup was done in docker-compose.yml, and you can use docker-compose to manage the server.

docker compose up -d

Most of the required documents are in itzg/minecraft-server's website. You can visit here to get more information.

How to add mods, datapacks, and other things

mods

We use mods.txt to manage mods, and you can add mods' name in it.

datapacks

Although we can use datapacks.txt to manage datapacks, but we don't use it now, since not all datapacks are placed in a solid network location.

That means when server try to download datapacks from the network, it may fail.

So we directly pre-download all datapacks and place them in datapacks folder.

backup

Although we have already added itzg/mc-backup to backup the server, but we still need to backup the server manually.

You can use copy-backup-example.sh to copy the latest backup to your local computer.

./copy-backup.sh # alter the example script to your own.

backup the server immediately from the volume

The regular backup process will only backup the server once per day, but if you want to backup the server immediately, you can use the following command to do it.

rm -rf ~/volume-tmp-transfer
docker run --rm -v minecraft_mc:/data -v ~/volume-tmp-transfer:/backup alpine ash -c "cd /data ; cp -av . /backup/"

Then, restore the backup by the following command.

docker run --rm -v minecraft_mc:/data -v ~/volume-tmp-transfer:/backup alpine ash -c "cd /backup ; cp -av . /data/"
rm -rf ~/volume-tmp-transfer

Setup the git-lfs for backup

Instead of GitHub, GitLab provides unlimited bandwidth for git-lfs, and a 10GB free storage for each repository. So we can use GitLab to backup the server, if the world size is less than 10GB.

We may consider using git-lfs to backup the server, but we need to setup the git-lfs first.

Assume we have a minecraft-backup-pool lfs repository, and we want to backup the server to it.

First, init the repository.

cd ~/minecraft-backup-pool
git init

Then, go to GitLab and create a new repository. And create a new access token in Settings > Access Tokens. The token should have at least two permissions:

• read_repository
• write_repository And choose the Developer role for the token.

After token created, go to your Minecraft's machine and add the remote repository. (In the minecraft-backup-pool)

git remote add origin https://{USERNAME}:{TOKEN}@gitlab.com/{USERNAME}/{REPONAME}.git

Then, setup the git-lfs.

git lfs install

done.

After these steps, you can use git lfs to track the backup files.

But if you want to directly track all files in the pool folder, you can use the following command.

# assume you are in the pool folder.
git lfs track "*.tgz"

And please note that before you start to push lfs files to a remote repository, you have to enable the Include Git LFS objects in archives option in the repository's settings.

Automation

You can check the post-backup.sh, docker-compose.yml to see how I use git-lfs to backup the server, which runs all steps I described above automatically.

Things you may need to care about:

• Put your token-url in a secret place. In my case, I put it in the docker secret.
• Consider rewrite all git history to ensure the previous LFS files won't existed in the .git folder. (I use git filter-repo to do this). This will help us to reduce the repository's size, and also help us to avoid the LFS files to stay on the remote repository. Using git filter-repo will remove the git remote configuration, so we need to add it again.

How to remove unused mods, datapacks, and other things

Usually this happened when we remove a mod "A" in mods.txt. The mod "A" will still in the mods folder, since there's no any integrations can help us apply mod-removal changes automatically. This will cause the server to crash once server's version has upgraded to a newer number but the mod "A" didn't.

So do datapacks.

Therefor, for manually removing unused mods, datapacks, and other things, we may consider to use docker-compose-volume-check.yml to modify the volume.

docker compose -f docker-compose-volume-check.yml up -d

This will immediately stop the minecraft server (if running) and initiate a new simple linux server (ubuntu) which has minecraft's volume mounted, and you can modify the volume as you want.