Manaha Minder for Minecraft

Manaha is a server that I own/rent, the name is just a funny sound.

In 2013 a friend convinced me to host a Minecraft instance, and this VPS was the easiest option.
I came up with some scripts in shell and Perl in order to add some "nice" features - like having no operators by default, but allowing certain players to request temporary operator status.

In 2016 the server closed down due to lack of use. Now in 2023 I started getting the itch to play again, and decided to resurrect the server. The old scripts weren't very self-explanatory, so I decided to rewrite them in Go.

Features

• Welcome message when players log in
• Optional random gift given when players log in
• No operators by default.
  You can configure a list of players who are allowed to request operator status for a specified amount of time.
• Ability to specify Minecraft commands to run when players say something specific in chat.
• Website helpers:
  • Show online players.
  • For offline players, show when they were last seen.
  • Log activity to a file.
  • Calculate the amount of time each player has been online.
• Checks is the Minecraft server has crashed, and restarts it if necessary.
• Ability to restart the Minecraft server at a specified time each day.
• Unzips the historic log files from the Minecraft server.

Installation

Prerequisites

Manaha Minder was built to work with Minecraft servers managed with MSM.
Sending commands to the Minecraft server is done via MSM.

If you want to use the status and activity logging features, you will need a web server.

This has been designed for a Linux based system running systemd. It may work on other systems, but this has not been tested.

Installing

Currently, there are no binaries available, so you will need to build from source:

1. Note down the user that is running the Minecraft server via MSM. This will be used later.
2. Clone the repository

   git clone github.com/forquare/manaha-minder

3. Build the binary

   go build

4. Copy the binary to the location you want to run it from

   sudo cp manaha_minder /usr/local/bin

5. Create the configuration file "/etc/mminder.yaml", and use the configuration section below to populate it
6. Replace the default user in the systemd service file with the user you noted down in step 1:

   sed -i 's/manaha-minecrafter/YOUR_USER/' manaha-minder.service

7. Copy the systemd service file

   sudo cp manaha-minder.service /etc/systemd/system

8. Enable the service:

   sudo systemctl enable manaha-minder.service

9. Start the service:

   sudo systemctl start manaha-minder.service

10. Check the status of the service:

sudo systemctl status manaha-minder.service

Configuration

The configuration file is in the YAML format.

Although not a requirement, it is advisable to use the yamllint command to check the syntax of the file to prevent any errors. To do so, install the yamllint package, and then run the command:

yamllint /etc/mminder.yaml

In the configuration below, the server name "manaha" is used as an example. Please replace this with the name of your server.

---
minecraft_server:
  # The server name in MSM
  server_name: manaha

  # Location of the latest.log file
  latest_log_file: /opt/msm/servers/manaha/logs/latest.log

  # Location of all logs
  log_dir: /opt/msm/servers/manaha/logs

  # Path to the world directory
  world_dir: /opt/msm/servers/manaha/worldstorage/world

  # Path to Minecraft whitelist.json
  whitelist_file: /opt/msm/servers/manaha/whitelist.json

  # Path to MSM command
  msm_binary: /usr/local/bin/msm

  # Settings for restarting the Minecraft server
  restart:
    # Whether to restart the server
    enabled: true

    # The time to restart the server using the cron format
    # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron
    # This example will restart the server at 5am every day
    cron: "0 5 * * *"

  # Keep an eye on common server errors and restart the server if they occur
  watchdog: true

  # Decompress archived log files
  log_decompress: false

manaha_minder:
  # SQLite database file
  # The database is used to store a variety of information
  # including player activity and operator requests
  database: /home/manaha-minecrafter/var/manaha-minder.db
      
  # Set the logging level for manaha minder.
  # The levels are:
      # Trace - shows everything, will likely overwhelm you!
      # Debug - gives a good idea about what is going on
      # Info - shows noteworthy events
      # Warn - shows events that are not necessarily errors, but may be worth investigating
      # Error - shows errors that are not fatal
      # Fatal - shows fatal errors, this also crashes the service
      # Panic - similar to fatal, but worse
  # It is recommended to use info or warn for normal operation
  log_level: Warn

login:
  # The message to display when a player logs in
  # <PLAYER> will be replaced with the player's name
  welcome_message: |-
    Welcome <PLAYER>!
    We hope you have fun on the server!
    
  # Enable the server to give a random gift to players when they log in.
  # There is about a 3% chance of a gift being given.
  give_random_gift: true


operator:
  # Duration that operator status lasts for in seconds
  duration: 600  # 10 minutes
  
  # Players that can become operators
  players:
    - username1
    - other_username

activity:
  # Whether to log player activity, if false, the rest of the activity settings are ignored
  log_activity: true
  
  # Whether to recalculate the activity of players when the server starts
  recalculate_activity_on_startup: true
  
  ###################################################################
  # Website helpers                                                 #
  # These are optional, and require a web server to be configured   #
  # Please see the wiki for more information:                       #
  # https://github.com/forquare/Manaha-Minder/wiki/Webpage          #
  ###################################################################
  
  # Enable calculating the amount of time each player has been online and outputting it to a file
  generate_time_played_output: true
  
  # Where the activity calculations should be outputted to
  time_played_file: /var/www/html/activity.txt
  
  # Enable generating a status page for the website
  generate_status_table: true
  
  # Where the status page should be outputted to
  status_file: /var/www/html/players.html

# Custom actions are a YAML list of actions to perform when a command is run
custom_actions:
    # The name of the action
  - name: "Go home"
    # A description of the action
    description: "Teleport a player back to the original spawn point"
    # What the action should be triggered on - this uses a regular expression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
    pattern: "^take me home$"
    # The commands to run when the action is triggered
    # <PLAYER> will be replaced with the player's name
    # There is a 1 second delay between each command
    commands:
      - "say <PLAYER> wants to go home"
      - "say Teleporting PLAYER to original spawn point"
      - "tp <PLAYER> 0 73 0"

    # Another example
  - name: "Need some coal"
    description: "Give a the player some coal"
    pattern: "^need some coal$"
    commands:
      - "say <PLAYER> wants some coal"
      - "say Giving <PLAYER> some coal"
      - "give <PLAYER> coal"

Running

Once you have installed and configured Manaha Minder, you can start it by running the command:

sudo systemctl start manaha-minder.service

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on the code of conduct, and the process for submitting Pull Requests.

Versioning

Semantic Versioning is used for versioning.

Authors

• Ben Lavery-Griffiths - Forquare - Website

See also the list of contributors who have participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT Licence - see the LICENSE file for details

Releasing

1. Apply code changes via Pull Requests
2. Update local main branch to latest
3. Create an annotated tag with the new version
   git tag -a x.x.z -m "Descriptive message"
4. Push the tag
   git push --tags
5. The release action will run using GoReleaser to create the next release

All tags are protected so that only certain users can create them.