Becoming disposable

A while ago, the guys at IT department of where I work, emailed us for some mini-pc's offer. In a really good price.

I got one and had it laying around, then a day both of my kids got interested in minecraft, then I found a good use for it (finally).

After a while the solution I made for them became a reliability. Once in a while minecraft launcher would update and they could not connect to the local server. The update would necessitate a server restart.

The setup was easy, I wiped everything in it and installed https://www.alpinelinux.org/, given the limited resources having a light OS was essential. Instantly after having alpine up and running I set up docker then it was a kid toy to launch the server, you would just docker run -d -it -p 25565:25565 -e EULA=TRUE itzg/minecraft-server, docker would pull the open source self-hosted minecraft server and expose it on its default port.

Getting back to the maintenance, kids would have to wait for me to get back from work to just merely restart the container. Which upon restart would update the server software to match the launcher version for minecraft.

Then the lamp just went on, from Robots movie.

I launched an additional container to help him self serve, you can check out source files here: docker-minecraft-server-manager repository

I confess, the solution made me disposable.