MacCraft creates standalone Minecraft client and server applications for running your own private server on your own home network.
Why would you want standalone applications to run Minecraft clients and servers? In our house we all want to play together in the same world, but we share computers. The standalone client applications allow each person to play as "themselves" regardless of which computer they are using. The standalone server app allows anyone in the house to double click on the app icon to start the server. And we can have multiple different server applications depending upon which world we want to play in.
The applications are actually small shell scripts that start Minecraft when run. We use Platypus to package up the scripts into a MacOS application complete with icons.
The bin/maccraft command is used to generate the client and server
applications. It has some basic help usage to get you started. But read on for a
more details explanation of what is going on.
To create a client application for "John":
bin/maccraft --client Johnthis generates a pkg/John Minecraft.app client application file.
To createa a server application:
bin/maccraft --server 1.10.2 'Rainbow Unicorn'this generates a pkg/Rainbow Unicorn.app server application file.
You need to have Minecraft installed and up-to-date on each machine where you
will be playing. Since we are not distributing any of the Minecraft jar files,
they must already be present on the machines. The version of Minecraft used to
generate the client apps must be the same on the machien where the client app
will be run.
The server app is a standalone deal. You do not need Minecraft to be installed
on the machine where the server is running. MacCraft will download the server
jar file from the minecraft.net download page and package it up into the
server application.
As you create client applications, the information about each player is stored
in a config/players.json file. You can manually edit this file to define new
players and to grant players operator privileges on the server.
Generally you will want to create a client application for each player, and you'll want to create the clients before creating the server. The reason for this is the player UUIDs.
The Minecraft server is responsible for generating UUIDs for each player. This works well when the server is authenticating users against the Mojang authentication service, but we are running a private server disconnected from the rest of the Internet. We cheat by generating UUIDs for players when the client application for that player is created.
These UUIDs are stored in the config/players.json file and they are used to
populate the usercache.json file. This usercache.json is used by servers to
map the user to a UUID. So as you add new users to existing servers, you'll want
to keep the usercache.json UUIDs in sync with the config/players.json UUIDs.
MacCraft uses:
MIT, see LICENSE for details.