Tag: linux

What is Minetest ?

Minetest (server) is a near-infinite-world block sandbox game and a game engine, inspired by InfiniMiner, Minecraft, and the like. It’s free and open source software and is available for Linux-based systems, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, MacOS, and Android.

Hosting a public minetest server on a debian/ubuntu vps(cloud server)

First step, choosing the Minetest version:

export branch=$(printf "Enter Minetest version: " >&2;read r;echo "$r")

It will ask you to enter a Minetest version. You can enter any numeric version, but you probably want one of these:

• master: Latest development state (5.4.0-dev)
• stable-0.4: Stable release in the 0.4 series (0.4.17.1) [UNSUPPORTED]
• stable-5: Stable release in the 5 series (5.3.0)

After you’ve done that just paste the one-line script into your terminal, taken from here:

(sudo apt-get install -y unzip g{it,cc,++} {c,}make zlib1g-dev lib{sqlite3,curl4-openssl,luajit-5.1,leveldb}-dev&&cd $(mktemp -d)&&wget downloads.sourceforge.net/irrlicht/irrlicht-1.8.4.zip -O irr.zip&&unzip -q irr.zip&&git clone https://github.com/minetest/minetest -b $branch&&cd minetest&&git clone https://github.com/minetest/minetest_game -b $branch games/minetest_game&&cmake . -DBUILD_CLIENT=0 -D{BUILD_SERVER,RUN_IN_PLACE,ENABLE_LEVELDB}=1 -DIRRLICHT_INCLUDE_DIR=$PWD/../irrlicht-1.8.4/include&&make -j$(nproc) package&&p=$(echo minetest-*.tar.gz)&&cp "$p" ~&&printf '\n\n\e[1;32mBuild successful, an archive called "%s" was placed in your home folder.\nTo run the server, extract the archive and run the executable inside the 'bin/' folder\e[0m\n' "$p")||printf '\n\n\e[1;31mBuild failed, review log output above to identify and fix the issue.\e[0m\n'

It will ask you for your password once in the beginning. Once it’s done you’ll have a .tar.gz archive in your home folder, you can extract it anywhere you’d like and run minetestserver from there like a portable installation.

so , extract the tar file as:

tar -xf minetest-5.4.0-linux.tar.gz

then cd into extracted directory , you should modify the minetest.conf file , to modify the game behaviour.

After that open the firewall on the port you want to run the server using ufw:

sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw allow 30000
sudo ufw allow ssh  #so that the vps login work later
sudo ufw status

well after that we can change the game by adding game in games folder, add other textures in textures folder , mods in mods folder and so on from where you extracted the .tar.gz archive( or your minetestserver installation) .

To run the server do:

Now since the server is running alright , any person who wants to connect to your minetest server can connect using minetest gui client they have on their devices , on the specific port your server is running . You can configure your minetest.conf file to control the behaviour of game as you wish.

Other installations options:

• use minetest-server package which is present in debian/ubuntu official package repository(although not recommended due to very old versions).
• Install into debian using Backports .
• Install into ubuntu using ppa.

Hope this guide helps you in creating the latest version of your own public minetest server 🙂