We run the minecraft server on a m6g.large spot instance on Amazon EC2, at the time of writing it costs $0.0346/hr. Configuring the DNS (for changing IPs) is done through Route 53 and a launch script.
Creating the EFS: Go to the Elastic File System dashboard and click on "Create file system". After it has been created, note down the file system ID.
Creating the AMI: Create an EC2 instance. Install amazon-efs-utils if not on Amazon Linux 2 and run mkdir /mnt/efs to create a mounting point for the EFS drive. Then install java 16 with apt install openjdk-16-jre-headless.
Getting Minecraft running: Attach the EFS drive with mount -t efs -o tls fs-...:/ /mnt/efs, where you fill in the dots with your file system ID. Then save PaperMC server to /mnt/efs/minecraft_server/ as paper.jar and try running it. To switch between different Minecraft worlds you can create a symbolic link (shortcut, created with ln -s destination source) to the one you want to play on. E.g. this is what our drive looks like:
├── minecraft_server -> minecraft_server-1.17.1-amplified
├── minecraft_server-1.16.5
├── minecraft_server-1.16.5-manhunt
└── minecraft_server-1.17.1-amplified
Route 53: Note down the hosted zone ID in Route 53. Create an A record, the IP does not matter.
Make sure the change resource file is placed at /mnt/efs/change-resource-record-sets.json.
Creating the launch template: Create the launch template in EC2 by right clicking on your instance: Image and templates → Create template from instance, and provide the user data script with file system and hosted zone IDs filled in.
- Figure out how to connect to changing IPs with ssh.
- Instead of
screen, configuresystemctlto launch the Minecraft server.