My son hopes we can host a Minecraft Server with lots of mods, but he wants our server based on the 1.8.x codebase, because of how it works with combat. I was concerned about security exploits on an older version of the software, but it seems that there aren’t too many well-published exploits in the wild. The current codebase for the server and client are up to 1.12 with 1.13 on the horizon, so our old server will need to allow folks with 1.9-1.12+ clients. Our server will also need to allow teleporting to other worlds, which we will accomplish with BungeeCord acting as a proxy and the Multiverse-Core plugin. We are opting to locally host the Minecraft Server from our Mac mini running High Sierra and macOS Server, so we also want Mac-specific startup scripts to automatically reboot the Minecraft Server suite any time after a reboot.
We considered running GlowStone, but for now, we decided to use Spigot for the server software and BungeeCord as the proxy for multiple worlds. To get these software packages and Mac-specific startup scripts configured and installed, we followed Kyler Holland’s video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7etfdVsNFw
We deviated from Kyler instructions with Spigot – we downloaded the latest 1.8.x version of Spigot (seemed to be 1.8.8), which we grabbed here:
https://getbukkit.org/download/spigot
And we also decided to run build 1303 of BungeeCord, which we nabbed here:
https://ci.md-5.net/job/BungeeCord/
We also modified the startup command for Spigot to give it 2 GB of memory using the following code:
#!/bin/bash
cd "$( dirname "$0" )"
java -Xmx2G -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -jar spigot-1.8.8-R0.1-SNAPSHOT-latest.jar
To allow 1.9 and newer Minecraft clients to join our 1.8 server, we loaded the ViaVersion-1.3.0 plugin available here:
https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/viaversion.19254/
We also bumped the RAM requirements to 2.5GB, And everything seems to be running fine.
Since the original install, we’ve added plugins, including EssentialsX-2.0.1, Factions, Multiverse-Core-2.6.0, PermissionsEx-1.23.4, worldedit-bukkit-6.1.7.3, and worldguard-6.2.1. There are a few more that he wants, so I hope they don’t compromise stability.