BedrockServerManager

Minecraft Bedrock server manager for Windows

This is a simple Minecraft Bedrock server manager. Using this program, you can manage your bedrock server and the world.

This program is released under MIT licence.

Features

• Interactive command line interface
• Timestamped bedrock server logs
• Manage the world backups using GIT. So backups are incremental and take less space.
• Manual live backup
• Backup restore (requires server to be stopped)
• Automatic periodic live backups

Why?

I run a small Bedrock server for myself and few friends. I run it on windows. I was looking for a server manager for windows where it will take periodic live backups. Most server managers copy files through zip which is a hassle to manage. I wanted something that will use git. So I decided to write one on my own.

So here we are.

Setting up

Step 1: Install git

Download and install git from git site.

Set up PATH variables

If you set up git with default settings, git should be in your PATH. You can verify this by opening a command prompt and type git. If this says not found, then you will need to add git to the PATH following these instructions.

• Right click on the windows button, click System.
• In the system properties window, click Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables.
• Edit the PATH variable (Either user or System will work) to include
• git.exe directory (usually C:\Program Files\Git\cmd).

Step 2: Install bedrock server

Download bedrock server and unzip to a directory of your choice.

Step 3: Copy BedrockServerManager.exe to your bedrock directory

Download and copy the latest BedrockServerManager.exe to your Bedrock server directory (directory that contains bedrock_server.exe) you just created.

You can find lates release of BedrockServerManager under releases section in github.

STEP 4: Initialize git

Open a command window, and navigate to your bedrock directory.

Create a new file named .gitignore and add the following to the file. These files will be ignored by the backup.

*.dll
*.exe
*.html
*.pdb
*.txt
valid_known_packs.json.json
behavior_packs
definitions
internalStorage
resource_packs
structures

git init .
git add .gitignore worlds\ permissions.json server.properties whitelist.json
git commit -m "Initial commit"

Verify if all is set by running git status. You should see something like:

On branch master
nothing to commit, working tree clean

Now proceed to next step.

Step 4: Run the server manager

You can now run the program by typing BedrockServerManager. This will show you the interactive prompt. By default the program is set up to back up every 30 minutes.

Command Line options

You can run BedrockServerManager -help to get list of supported options.

Troubleshooting

If you run into issues related to backup, exit the manager, run git status and make sure that the directory is clean. Once you get the directory to clean state, backup issues should disappear.

FAQs

Q: How to turn loggin on?

A: Verbose logs are written to %temp% directory. Look for recently modified files with name starting with BedrockServerManager.exe.XXX or run dir /OD %temp%\BedrockServerManager.exe.* to get the log log file list. Alternatively, you can also pass --logtostderr flag to print more verbose logging to the console though it can be very distracting.

Q: What parts are included in the backup A: Everything inside the git repo is included in the backup. The git repository can contain other files as well.

Q: Can I use git directly to restore? A: Yes, you can. Server manager is simply a convenient utility on top of git. You can use git directly to list, restore and do other things.

Q: How do I see what commands server manager runs? A: Check the details logs under %temp% directory. All commands are printed there.

Q: I want a new feature. What do I do? A: Open an issue to track. I can't guarantee but I'll try. You can also send me a PR.

Q: Why is the git commit objects have no history? A: This is intentional to allow cleanup of older backups. All backups are stored as git references (branches). Keeping history chained will make it very difficult to get rid of old backups.

Q: My backups are taking lots of space. How do free up some space? A: First delete the unnecessary backups using backup delete or backup prune commands. You can then run git garbage collection by running $ git reflog expire --all --expire-unreachable=now and then $ git gc --prune=now to free up disk space.

Q: Can you clean up periodic backups automatically? A: Yes, try backup prune command.

Q: Do backup delete permanently deletes the backup? A: It will remove the git branch, but the underlying data will live until git garbage collection runs (which usually runs every 2 weeks). So if you want to recover deleted backup, you can run git log --reflog to search for the ones. Also, all deleted backups will be logged to the log file. Check the hash there and then manually tag them.

Issues

Hope you find this useful and like it. If you find any issues, please report or send PR.