Minecraft in docker blog post

blogContent/posts/java/running-a-minecraft-server-with-docker.md

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+Close your eyes for one moment and imagine that everything you host runs in docker containers.
+You no longer need to battle system dependencies, and configurations are more manageable; it is now easier to backup and transfer your applications.
+
+In my quest to dockerize everything, I am now dockerizing my Minecraft server.
+Minecraft is a relatively simple application to host since it is just a single Java application that you need to run.
+To put this in Docker, we need to declare a Java Docker image that launches our Minecraft server.
+
+```bash
+FROM openjdk:8u232
+
+WORKDIR /root/minecraft
+
+CMD java -Xmx2048M -jar spigot-1.10.jar -o true
+```
+
+To make this Docker container work, we need to mount the volume containing our Minecraft files to the path "/root/minecraft" in our Docker container.
+By mounting the volume, it enables us the persist the data between consecutive runs.
+
+
+To orchestrate all of my Docker containers, I am using Docker-compose.
+Although there is only one container for this instance, I can add additional services to this file; for example, If I had a website that went along with my server, I could use docker-compose to launch both the Minecraft server and the server's website.
+
+```yaml
+version: "2.2"
+
+networks:
+  bridge-network:
+    external:
+      name: bridge-network
+
+services:
+  minecraft:
+    restart: always
+    image: minecraft
+    build: ./minecraft-docker
+    networks:
+      - bridge-network
+    volumes:
+      - "./minecraft:/root/minecraft"
+    ports:
+      - "8123:8123"
+      - "25565:25565"
+```
+
+To expose the Minecraft server to the internet, we need to tell docker-compose the applications ports.
+I am using a bridged docker network along with appending the ports in the docker-compose configuration file.
+Port 25565 is the default Minecraft server port, and port 8123 gets used by Dynmap.
+To create the network bridge, you need to run this command once.
+
+```bash
+docker network create -d bridge bridge-network
+```
+
+We need to execute the build command to generate our new Minecraft Docker container:
+
+```bash
+docker-compose build
+```
+
+To launch the server, we just run the compose-up command.
+
+```bash
+docker-compose up
+```
+
+One quick note on the file structure that I am employing for this project:
+I like to keep the Dockerfiles in a directory separate from any volumes that I am mounting within those containers.
+Additionally, it is a good practice to have your docker-compose file at the root directory.
+
+
+```bash
+╭─jeff@dangerous ~/Docker 
+╰─$ tree -L 2
+.
+├── docker-compose.yml
+├── minecraft
+│   ├── banned-ips.json
+│   ├── banned-players.json
+│   ├── bukkit.yml
+│   ├── commands.yml
+│   ├── crash-reports
+│   ├── eula.txt
+│   ├── logs
+│   ├── ops.json
+│   ├── permissions.yml
+│   ├── plugins
+│   ├── run.bat
+│   ├── server-icon.png
+│   ├── server.properties
+│   ├── spigot-1.10.jar
+│   ├── spigot.yml
+│   ├── survival
+├── minecraft-docker
+│   └── Dockerfile
+└── README.md
+```
+
+
+Docker will scan the entire director before building a project-- Docker does this so it knows what caches it can use during an incremental build.
+To improve the build time, I add the Minecraft server folder to the docker-ignore file to prevent Docker from scanning all the world artifacts.
+
+```bash
+# .dockerignore file
+minecraft
+```