This article is also available on my blog.
In my previous post I walked through the setup of a Minecraft server with docker. But now you might want to setup a few servers on the same host and route domains to them without different ports, a bit like reverse proxying.
By default Minecraft runs on port 25565
, but when we have multiple servers running on the same host, they can't all expose port 25565
and so you end up with something like 25565, 25566, 25567
etc. With mc-router, we can route all those domains to 25565
and resolve them to the configured server!
The Environment
At a minimum you'll need Docker installed on the host, but we'll also be using Docker Compose. If you followed the previous post you're all set. If you need to install Docker Compose, you can follow their guide here.
This solution also requires at least one domain to route to our server. Point your desired domains or subdomains at the server ip hosting your servers. If you're experimenting with this locally, you can add an entry to your hosts file to point to localhost
. In this post I'll be using the following example domains set in my hosts file:
nano /etc/hosts
mc.example.com
modded.example.com
events.example.com
Setting up the router
We'll be using another docker image from itzg, this time itzg/mc-router. So go a head an open you docker compose file. If you followed the previous post, we'll continue using the same docker-compose.yaml
file.
First we're going to need to remove our ports
definition for each server, we don't need to expose these any more as we'll make use of dockers internal networking. Then we can go ahead and add our mc-router
service.
version: "3.8"
services:
vanilla:
container_name: vanilla
image: itzg/minecraft-server
environment:
EULA: "TRUE"
MEMORY: 2G
volumes:
- ./vanilla:/data
restart: unless-stopped
tty: true
stdin_open: true
mc-router:
image: itzg/mc-router
environment:
API_BINDING: ":25564"
ports:
- 25565:25565
# bind the API port to only loopback, this avoids external exposure
- 127.0.0.1:25564:25564
command: --mapping=mc.example.com=vanilla:25565,modded.example.com=modded:25565,events.example.com=events:25565
You can see in the command
line, we've mapped our domains to our containers:
mc.example.com -> vanilla
modded.example.com -> modded
events.example.com -> events
Now go ahead and startup the stack with docker compose up
and test them out in your Minecraft client!
If you'd like to know a little more about how it works, I'd recommend taking a look at the itzg/mc-router doc where they include some diagrams and alternative configurations.
This article is also available on my blog.
Top comments (1)
Thanks for creating this article! I just wanted to suggest a couple of clarifications:
/etc/hosts
file shown seems to be incomplete and therefore is a little misleading. Each line should be an IP address and the host. Rather than mentioning "localhost" for testing, it's more important to let readers know that the loopback address127.0.0.1
should be utilized, such as what is shown in the intro section.