RIP Craftbukkit, Moving On
The Death of CraftBukkit
Craftbukkit kinda died a year ago in a big dramatic flare-up. That sucked. We were running a server based on it, and continued running the last public version, 1.7.9-R0.2 while hoping things might resolve well. They didn’t.
It’s time to call it: CraftBukkit, and the underlying Bukkit server, are well and truly dead. It’s time to migrate the server. There are other pressures: I want to change hosting providers; make the server creation, backup, and monitoring more robust; and make it easier to admin.
Moving On …
In good news, it allows me to finish the blog series I started back when, and update it for smarter things. I’m using some time this weekend to look into what’s best, so here’s what I’ve learned.
Requirements
- Multiple worlds: the kids have invested a lot of time in the three worlds we have, so that’s got to continue.
- Permissions management: I don’t want to op kids for the whole server, but I don’t mind letting them rule a world.
- Different settings across worlds: some of the worlds are creative, some are survival. Various rules apply in each of them. We need to keep that true.
- Chat across worlds: the kids frequently chat with each other while in different worlds, often calling for each other to come see and try stuff. That’s where the fun is.
- Grief prevention and bad word management, because kids.
Ideally, it would just support the CraftBukkit APIs so that CraftBukkit mods would continue to work. Least pain to migrate and all that.
The Alternatives
So of course I first started by searching for posts from folks who’ve made this journey in the past … and found nothing significant. I think my search-fu must be inadequate. So, I spent a couple of hours just reading forums to see what was possible.
- Vanilla Minecraft with Forge: promising, especially since Arun Gupta and son authored a book about modding with Forge. Not API compatible with Bukkit, but has reasonable docs and there are some efforts to add Bukkit APIs via plugin though very old; also, there’s a plugin to add Bukkit functionality.
- Sponge: Promising, and there’s a short migration guide but no CraftBukkit API compatibility, so we’d need to find new plugins to handle the job and Ore, the plugin directory for Sponge seems not to be ready for production.
- Spigot: Spigot, an early fork of CraftBukkit, aims to be a more efficient version of Bukkit for modding Minecraft. That means API compatibility is a given, and explains why it’s the leading server according to MCstats.org*. Very promising, and very active
- Craftbukkit?!: Yup, you read right. Since Spigot is an early fork, they still contain the forked CraftBukkit code and avoided the DMCA takedown issues. Building Spigot also builds CraftBukkit, so I could just use that and move on, in theory. CraftBukkit is dead, long live CraftBukkit.
*MCStats requires a plugin to send data, so Spigot is the leading server among folks who run the MCstats plugin when the MCstats servers are up to collect data, yada yada.
There are many others, but these are the serious contenders for us to migrate our server to. I’ll be exploring them and try to do a decent post on how we went from where we are to there.
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