Hosting implementation of minetest server using custom Docker image for the Mercurio minetest server.

You need to have both docker and docker composer installed and working, and optionally you can use make to run the scripts more easily.

In order to change some settings for your local develoopment environment, copy the docker-compose.dev.yml as a local override. This way you can change things such as the server port:

cp docker-compose.dev.yml docker-compose.override.yml

To test locally, you can use:

make run

This command will use docker compose to execute all the services needed, including a local PostgreSQL database, the Discord chat bridge and the game server itself.

To test the server, launch the minetest client and connect with 127.0.0.1 and port 30000.

The containers will store data in a .minetest folder in the current directory. The game data will be in .minetest/world, and the database files are under .minetest/db.

To make a backup you can use the following make target:

make backup

Backups will be stored in $HOME/backups/.

Sometimes you may want to open a shell interpreter inside the running container, in order to check if all things are right. There is a make target for that as well:

make shell

This will open a shell with root privileges so you can debug the game server. It is required that you have the server running in the background (i.e. you need to have it running from make run first).

Sometimes you may run into permission issues. I'm not sure why/how to fix them permanently, but I have made a small shell script to fix them as a workaround:

make fix-perms

This one requires your login shell to have sudo privileges.

For this server, we are using a local copy of the released mods from ContentDB whenever possible, plus a few set of Git submodules when some special patch is needed or when the mod is not published to the central repository.

The reason to use ContentDB is mostly because a) I'm using specific versions of the mods, that are released by the mod authors and intended to be used by the public and b) there is a team of people that curates the published mods to make sure they abide for the documented policies.

If mods are available from ContentDB, one can use the command line tool contentdb that I have developed to both add a new mod or to update existing ones. Please check the installation instructions here: https://github.com/ronoaldo/minetools#install-pre-compiled-binaries-on-linux.

It is as simple as running the contentdb install command. For instance, to install the mod PA 28 from APercy, available at content.minetest.net/packages/apercy/pa28, use:

contentdb install apercy/pa28

The syntax is basically author/modname from the ContentDB API (same used in the browser URL). The command must be executed from the root folder of the project.

Similar to the Installing a new mod from ContentDB part, the tool can be used to update a mod:

contentdb install --update apercy/pa28

There is a convenience command in the tool that can be used to update all at once:

contentdb update