Minecraft, Python and Fedora

Minecraft and Python

What this is about

Lately I bought above book as I wanted to start teaching my 9 - years old kid how to script a bit w/Python in his beloved Minecraft world.

The book is great, but for one thing. Its first part is about installing Minecraft, Spigot server and Python API on Windows or Mac or Raspberry-PI (w/some Debian/Ubuntu based distro on board).

As we run Fedoras on our laptops (and on my server that is a physical machine placed in our basement) I had to somehow make it work in our environment.

Scenario

So the scenario here is that Minecraft client (game) will be run on laptops while Spigot server will be run on the Fedora 27 server inside of systemd-nspawn container. Thanks to running it on container we will not contaminate server's libraries.

You may of course install all of this on your laptop instead having server and game running on same host (localhost).

Creating systemd-nspawn container for Minecraft server

This step is not needed at all. I just wanted to have Minecraft server installed under systemd-nspawn container. I will not elaborate here about creating containers as this is totally another matter.

If you'd like to also create systemd-nspawn container you may find following files helpful:

Installing Spigot server on Fedora

This one is actually simple. First install all prerequisites:

sudo dnf install -y java-9-openjdk java-9-openjdk-devel git maven

Now download server libraries (preferably as user minecraft to /home/minecraft/minecraft):

mkdir /home/minecraft/minecraft
cd /home/minecraft/minecraft
wget "https://hub.spigotmc.org/jenkins/job/BuildTools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/target/BuildTools.jar"

And now build it - provide same version as you have on your Minecraft game:

git config --global --unset core.autocrlf
java -jar BuildTools.jar --rev 1.12.2

After a while Your server is all built up. Now you need to install RaspberryJuice plugin for Bukkit that actually create socket API that will be used by Python API helper:

git clone https://github.com/zhuowei/RaspberryJuice /home/minecraft/minecraft/RaspberryJuice
cd /home/minecraft/minecraft/RaspberryJuice
mvn package

When above is ready you need to copy freshly built jar to Spigot plugins directory (use latest version of the built file; mine was 1.11):

mkdir -p /home/minecraft/minecraft/plugins
cp /home/minecraft/minecraft/RaspberryJuice/jars/raspberryjuice-1.11.jar /home/minecraft/minecraft/plugins/

Now you need to confirm that you agree to all terms (haha lol) by creating eula.txt file:

echo "eula=true" > /home/minecraft/minecraft/eula.txt

Afterwards you just need to start the server. You may create start.sh script with following contents (remember - provide here same version as your Spigot server and Minecraft client):

#!/bin/sh

java -Xms512M -Xmx1024M -jar spigot-1.12.2.jar

or use system unit file I provided on Github

Installing Python API on Fedora

Now we need to install Python API library. Most internet guides tells about running sudo pip3 install .... I don't like it as this would pollute your global Python path with some Minecraft API library. C'mon.

So imo we should rather create virtualenv for this:

mkvirtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3 minecraft

And now we can safely install the API library:

workon minecraft
wget https://github.com/py3minepi/py3minepi/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
pip3 install ./py3minepi-master

And that's all. Now the following code run from your virtualenv should just work:

from mcpi.minecraft import Minecraft
# Provide proper IP of the server when not on localhost:
# mc = Minecraft.create('192.168.8.21')
mc = Minecraft.create()
mc.postToChat('Hello server!')

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