Minecraft Operator

A Kubernetes operator for dedicated servers of the video game Minecraft Java Edition. This allows you to administer and configure a Minecraft server solely using the Kubernetes API — no remote shell, SFTP, or graphical admin interfaces are required.

Note that this is 🚧 alpha-grade 🚧 software. No guarantee is provided (see the license), and users are responsible for the security and data-integrity of their own servers. The API surface is subject to change. This software is not endorsed or supported by Microsoft, Mojang, or the Minecraft development team.

All the heavy-lifting is done by the excellent itzg/docker-minecraft-server. That container image is what is actually deployed into the cluster as a Pod. This project isn't endorsed or supported by itzg either.

You can install the latest version of the operator by running this command with your cluster configured in kubectl.

curl -L https://github.com/JamesLaverack/minecraft-operator/releases/latest/download/operator.yaml | kubectl apply -f -

The command above will install the operator at a specific release. You can also change the image tag to either latest to always get the latest published release or edge to get the latest build of the main branch. However, doing so won't get you YAML updates (e.g., adding new permissions or custom resource definition updates). (Also the edge tag publishes before tests are run, so it comes with even fewer guarantees than normal.)

You can verify everything is working by looking for the operator Pod in the minecraft-operator-system namespace, e.g.:

kubectl --namespace minecraft-operator-system get pod

If this gives you a running Pod, then it's likely all good.

Once the operator is installed, you can create a Minecraft server by creating a MinecraftServer object in Kubernetes. This will create and manage resources such as a Pod and a Service. Resources are created in whatever namespace the MinecraftServer object is in.

Note that the API uses "allowList" in place of "whitelist", but it is applied to the server in the same way.

apiVersion: minecraft.jameslaverack.com/v1alpha1
kind: MinecraftServer
metadata:
  name: my-minecraft-server
spec:
  eula: Accepted
  minecraftVersion: 1.18.1
  type: Paper
  opsList:
    - name: Player1
      uuid: da6a1ae6-e2f5-4e32-9135-b82a9ef426a9
  allowList:
    - name: Player2
      uuid: 880182d6-a0e3-44cd-a57c-8dc3799e92b8
  world:
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: minecraft-world
  motd: "My Minecraft Server"
  maxPlayers: 8
  viewDistance: 16
  externalServiceIP: 192.168.1.51
  vanillaTweaks:
    survival:
      - 'multiplayer sleep'
      - 'afk display'
    items:
      - 'player head drops'
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: minecraft-world
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi