Minecraft

Minecraft is a game about placing blocks and going on adventures.

Introduction

This chart creates a single Minecraft Pod, plus Services for the Minecraft server and RCON.

Prerequisites

• 512 MB of RAM
• Kubernetes 1.4+ with Beta APIs enabled
• PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure

Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name minecraft, read the Minecraft EULA run:

helm install minecraft \
  --set minecraftServer.eula=true itzg/minecraft

This command deploys a Minecraft dedicated server with sensible defaults.

Tip: List all releases using helm list

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the minecraft deployment:

helm delete minecraft

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

Configuration

Refer to values.yaml for the full run-down on defaults. These are a mixture of Kubernetes and Minecraft-related directives that map to environment variables in the itzg/minecraft-server Docker image.

Specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example,

helm install --name minecraft \
  --set minecraftServer.eula=true,minecraftServer.Difficulty=hard \
  itzg/minecraft

Alternatively, a YAML file that specifies the values for the parameters can be provided while installing the chart. For example,

helm install --name minecraft -f values.yaml itzg/minecraft

Tip: You can use the default values.yaml

Persistence

The itzg/minecraft-server image stores the saved games and mods under /data.

When persistence.dataDir.enabled in values.yaml is set to true PersistentVolumeClaim is created and mounted for saves but not mods. In order to enable this functionality you can change the values.yaml to enable persistence under the sub-sections under persistence.

"An emptyDir volume is first created when a Pod is assigned to a Node, and exists as long as that Pod is running on that node. When a Pod is removed from a node for any reason, the data in the emptyDir is deleted forever."

Backups

You can backup the state of your minecraft server to your local machine via the kubectl cp command.

NAMESPACE=default
POD_ID=lionhope-387ff8d-sdis9
kubectl exec --namespace ${NAMESPACE} ${POD_ID} rcon-cli save-off
kubectl exec --namespace ${NAMESPACE} ${POD_ID} rcon-cli save-all
kubectl cp ${NAMESPACE}/${POD_ID}:/data .
kubectl exec --namespace ${NAMESPACE} ${POD_ID} rcon-cli save-on

Known issues

rclone can attempt to update its configuration file when there is data to be modified, such as missing configuration entries or tokens. As this configuration file will most likely be stored in a ConfigMap or a Secret, it will be read-only and the container will generate errors like this one:

rclone: 2023/11/22 21:41:18 ERROR : Failed to save config after 10 tries: failed to create temp file for new config: open /config/rclone/rclone.conf4086229703: read-only file system

In that case, double-check if there are missing entries in your rclone configuration as this might be the reason why rclone throws an error. This might not solve all cases, though.

For more information, see this GitHub issue

Tutorials

For a quickstart guide to setting up a Kubernetes cluster and deploying Minecraft servers using this Helm Chart see:

gilesknap/k3s-minecraft