Minecraft Server

2021-08-25

When one of my friends suggested we do something nostalgic, I didn't expect that they wanted to play Minecraft. I was even more surprised when I found a good place to run the server was in Oracle Cloud.

Of course with the Autumn weather starting early this year I think they had a good point, so I had a go at setting one up. It was easy enough to follow along an existing blog post on how to deploy a Minecraft: Java Edition server to Oracle Cloud, but I wanted to put my recent experience with Terraform to good use.

The result was a small Terraform project which sets up the needed network resources in Oracle cloud and then deploys and (mostly) provisions a Minecraft server. I am particularly happy with the awful hack of restricting SSH access to only the machine that ran the Terraform script.

Nice things to improve for the future would be using a proper firewall entry for the server ports and a systemd service file to ensure that Minecraft is automatically restarted in case of a crash.

You can find the source code on GitHub.