Although this is completely unrelated, I thought it was important enough to document on my blog so I decided to do so.

Today, I had to install CentOS7 on a server. Since I'm taking Java and everything, I thought I'd get back into hosting servers for Minecraft, since development for them is done in Java and it's pretty much where I got all of my knowledge. I also learned a ton of Linux commands from doing this. However, it's been a year or so since I last had a server, so I decided now would be a good time to pick it back up.

I first installed CentOS Minimal to my server PC. I chose Minimal because I don't really need the GUI, only command line to run a few Java programs - Spigot, which is a high-performance re-coded Minecraft server, and BungeeCord, another Java program which creates a proxy, enabling a player to teleport in between multiple hosted servers on the same machine or different IPs. For the most part, it's used with Spigot.

I got CentOS Minimal from their website, then installed it to a flash drive with Lili USB Creator (since in Windows, it's overly complex to create drives).

I then installed it to the PC, and then I had to get Java 8. That I had to do via FTP, since I had no GUI. I used FileZilla. After going into the directory, I installed it by typing:

tar xzf jre-8u25-linux-x64.gz

I then had to install the server. I first made the directories:

mkdir Minecraft
cd Minecraft
mkdir Bungee
mkdir Server1
...
mkdir Server20

Although it's considered only 1 server, there are actually 20 servers, each running their own sets of plugins and game modes, etc., for the people that play on them. For this test server, I won't be running them all at once, however, once they go live, I usually go with a dedicated server with at least 64GB of RAM, and preferably an E3-1275 or better for CPU. Since there's so much activity going on, and so many players (avg. 350-500 per server * 20 servers if the server is known) a lot of resources are used up.

Anyways, in each directory, I then used FileZilla to put the server .jar file in each folder, and one-by-one ran each server. I then also went into the Bungee folder and ran that .jar file. Then, I used BungeeCord to tie all the servers together. Essentially what this means is, as soon as a player joins the game, they will be able to choose where they'd like to go without having to close their game and join a different server.

After this, I had to setup a web server. All good servers allow for a website for their players to communicate on forums, donate, vote for the server on server lists, etc. For my website, my personal preference was to use XenForo. When I bought it, it was a bit pricey ($140). But it's highly customizable with CSS, and it definitely does a good job of handling forums.

I used FileZilla to install XenForo. I also made a TeamSpeak installation (will come in handy later).

And that's about it! I now have a fully usable test server. All servers are run with screen so that they can be viewed and reloaded to test new code and plugin additions.