Create minecraft ECS services

This AWS CDK project contains a CDK stack definition to create ECS (dockerized) minecraft servers using persistent EFS filesystems to hold the worlds and their configuration.

Features:

• ECS services are initially created with a desiredCount of 0 meaning they won't incur any charges until you explicitly start them
• Each service has a separate EFS filesystem so that worlds are persisted across restarts, noting that there are storage charges for EFS filesystem volumes
• The docker image (from https://hub.docker.com/itzg/minecraft-server) downloads the latest minecraft version when started so you always have the latest
• Services are tagged with a discord guild/server id from the config file so that they can be started from a discord server using my discord bot
• An IAM group for starting and stopping the services is created, allowing you to create a least-privileges IAM user to start and stop minecraft
• Each service is created with a CloudWatch log group so that you can monitor them. Logs are configured for deletion after 7 days, noting that there are storage charges for logs.

To use:

1. cp minebot-config.json.sample minebot-config.json
2. Set the MINEBOT_CONFIG environment variable to point at your config file, e.g. export MINEBOT_CONFIG=${PWD}/minebot-config.json (bash)
3. Edit the config with details of your discord guilds (id == discord server/guild id) and minecraft operator usernames. If you don't have a discord guild/server just use any string as the id.
4. If you don't already have a the AWS cli installed and configured, install it and run aws configure to configure your default account and region details
5. If you don't already have the AWS cdk cli installed, install it
6. Follow the CDK instructions below to create and deploy the stack to your AWS account
7. Start your minecraft server(s) by updating the desired count to 1 via the AWS ECS console, then copy the task public IP address to connect to your server
8. Stop your minecraft server(s) by updating the desired count to 0 via the AWS ECS console
9. To add more servers, add new guild entries to minecraft-config.json and re-run cdk deploy

Assuming this all works, you can also try running my discord bot and inviting it to your server. This allows discord users on your servers to start/stop the minecraft server on demand.

CDK instructions

Create Python virtualenv

To manually create a virtualenv on MacOS and Linux:

$ python3 -m venv .venv

After the init process completes and the virtualenv is created, you can use the following step to activate your virtualenv.

$ source .venv/bin/activate

If you are a Windows platform, you would activate the virtualenv like this:

% .venv\Scripts\activate.bat

Once the virtualenv is activated, you can install the required dependencies.

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Create and deploy stack

At this point you can now synthesize the CloudFormation template for this code:

$ cdk synth

If this succeeds, then you can deploy:

$ cdk deploy

Enjoy!